The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected global economy, you need to build, nurture and engage with a social community around your products, company, and brand, all based around ”listening” to their needs and feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give you direct access to the latest information around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on your competition, spot new opportunities for engagement, and avert crises. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, businesses, brands, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include marketing professionals, market researchers, digital reputation managers, sales teams, social engagement and community staff, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of providers have made available many tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and very easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: Learn How To Grow Your Small Business Using A WordPress Blog
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to explore the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes built-in social features, like interactive commenting and discussions. A range of WordPress plugins can add additional social features to your site that let you reach a wider audience on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is often referred to as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to drive most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many great plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your content across various social media channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Use social measuring tools and applications to listen to what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay one step ahead of your competition.
Once you have identified new content opportunities, you can post messages individually on each of the social networks you’d like to reach, or publish these on a WordPress site that’s been configured to automatically notify your social networking sites.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Brand And Reputation
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for valuable insights.
Remember, we are born with two ears and one mouth as a reminder that we are meant to do twice as much listening as talking. What you post and how you respond to users online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community finds out about it.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate content across various social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of experts and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays researching social media and studying the profiles of individuals when looking for potential candidates to fill specific positions. As a business owner, you can do the same, and look for staff, network with other business owners, and connect with like-minded marketers and potential JV partners. Connecting with others through social channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, informative or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in the next section of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard about online reputation management. If you haven’t, you will be hearing about it more and more as time goes on, because it is becoming increasingly more important for many individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative effects with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to repair any damage, however, you first have to find out about it. The sooner you can spot a negative comment, bad review, or misinformed opinion, the sooner you can begin to do something about it.
That’s where social media monitoring tools can help you. If you Google yourself or your business and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies all around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of average individuals. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle is feeling hard done by.
- A former employee feels disgruntled after being fired.
- A potential employer searches online for information about you. They may not find anything bad, but there may not be a lot of good, positive things published online either to support the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
How are you managing your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective user review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, yesterday’s next big thing suddenly stops trending and gets replaced with the new “new” thing, services get discontinued, people retire, and so on.
All of this can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical content with additional useful comments or insightful opinions to your site not only can help drive more traffic to your business, but your blog or website could end up becoming an authoritative destination or resource for your niche or industry. People could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part two we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement resources. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Resources – Part Two
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)