The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a social community around your company, brand, and services.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest information about your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, be alerted to impending crises, assess competitor activity, and identify potential opportunities for engagement. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific brands, businesses, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including market researchers, marketing teams, PR companies, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately a number of providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track what consumers are saying about their products or brands so they can respond to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
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 Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress can be used to set up and manage a social community on your website.
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 regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that allow users to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your content across various social media networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tools and applications to discover what consumers want, identify trends and 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 those social networks.
Also, many apps are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand online, 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 to gain valuable insights.
Remember, we have been given 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 comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automatically syndicate your content across social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media allows you to discover and and maybe also be inspired by what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies research 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. Using social media to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot 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 to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, engaging, 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss many ways to create content with 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing it more and more as time goes on, because it is becoming increasingly more important for many individuals and brands to track what others are saying about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. 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 competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative 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 your name or your business/brand name and spot a negative comment or review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. There’s also the online reputation of individuals. For example, consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective system to manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Tracking Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 and new content ideas (have you noticed how all news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting topical content with your 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 a “go to” destination or resource for your niche or industry. People may 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 post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore WordPress resources and social media monitoring. To keep reading, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Tracking Tools – Part 2
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