Tag: Social Media WordPress

In Part 1 of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.

In this section, we examine a number of monitoring tools that allow you to:

• Search, find, sort, filter and organize users according to specific demographic criteria, psychographics, etc.
• Listen in on social conversations online
• Identify key consumer buying signals.

With this information, you can engage in meaningful conversations with prospects and pitch them your message.

Let’s move on now to some of the actual technologies you can use to monitor social media activity. If you’ve been looking for cost-effective ways to improve your business results using social media, then here are the top social analytics tools & resources for better understanding your ideal customers.

Great Social Media Resources For Business Owners

(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, and your competitors on social media)

Is there a simple and easy (and free) way to know what is new in your industry or niche so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is. It’s called …

Google Alerts

(Google Alerts – free web monitoring service)

Google Alerts is one of the easiest and most useful online tools available for keeping up-to-date with the latest news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people and companies, and tracking what is being written online about you and your business. Google Alerts is also free.

Google Alerts is not only useful for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for sourcing the latest news about people, companies, and any topic you are following.

With Google Alerts, you subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s robots index a new web page, press release, news update, blog post, a video, tweet, or any other indexable content related to that topic, you will automatically receive an email or RSS update.

If you would like to learn how to set up alerts with Google, see this simple step-by-step tutorial: How To Set Up Google Alerts

Hootsuite

(Hootsuite)

Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you manage all of your social media activities from a single dashboard.

Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service. You can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, monitor conversations, quickly create and customize analytics reports, share the workload amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations, and add employees and clients to teams without sharing passwords.

Hootsuite is one of the leading social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to many social networks, and offers integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.

Go here for more information: Hootsuite

Buffer

(Buffer)

Buffer lets you schedule your social content. Add updates to your Buffer account and Buffer will post it for you at spaced intervals.

Buffer allows you to schedule updates for a day, week, or month. Scheduling times are preset, but you can change these in your settings. In addition to the web interface, Buffer also provides mobile apps and a browser extension.

To learn more, visit this site: Buffer

SocialMetrics

(Social Metrics WordPress Social Analytics Plugin)

Social Metrics Pro is a WordPress plugin that monitors Tweets, Likes, Pins, +1s and other social signals from your Dashboard.

Some of the powerful features included in Social Metrics Pro include Excel-like conditional formatting, built-in and external widgets, sort, search and filter data, export data capabilities, one-click autoupdate functionality, and a simple social SEO improvement system.

Go here for a detailed article on Social Metrics: SocialMetricsPro Social Analytics Plugin For WordPress

Sociocaster

(Sociocaster)

Posting to your WordPress, Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter accounts is time-consuming. To get all of these tasks done you usually need to use different tools, web apps, or plugins. With Sociocaster, you can do this all from one dashboard with just a few clicks.

Sociocaster includes powerful marketing and social features: a powerful visual designer, the ability to spy on your competition, responsive mobile UI, agency license to manage unlimited social media accounts, and more.

More information: Sociocaster

SproutSocial

(SproutSocial.com)

SproutSocial is a premium social media management tool built for small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.

SproutSocial has a built-in CRM, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, custom reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.

Go here for more details: SproutSocial

SocialReport

(SocialReport)

SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that allows you to track and manage all of your social media accounts from one place.

Social Report tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and returns your social channel data on a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by customers or business, and track competitor profiles in addition to your own.

To learn more, go here: SocialReport

Followerwonk

(Followerwonk Twitter Analytics)

Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that provides insights into your Twitter followers and lets you sort your followers by any criteria to find your most important and influential followers, compare Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends, and explore and grow your social graph..

Go here for more details: Followerwonk

ManageFlitter

(ManageFlitter)

ManageFlitter provides a set of easy to use tools to empower you to work smarter and faster with Twitter.

ManageFlitter lets you sort followers and following lists using a range of criteria, post tweets at the best time to reach your followers, easily search inside your Twitter stream to find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and more.

For more information, visit this website: ManageFlitter

Beevolve

(Beevolve)

Beevolve.com is a social media monitoring platform designed for small and medium sized businesses, content marketers, online marketers, analysts, and community managers. It allows you to track your brand mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure sales and engagement, buzz, sentiment, etc. of all posts from one platform.

Visit this website to learn more: Beevolve

HowSociable

(HowSociable)

HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to monitor how brands and businesses are mentioned on the social web.

HowSociable displays brand viability metrics and gives you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and which channels can be improved.

Visit this website to learn more: HowSociable.com

Mention

(Mention.com)

Mention is a social monitoring tool for all kinds of businesses, agencies, marketers, CEOs, etc., and allows anyone to know what’s being said about them on blogs, news, websites, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook in real time.

Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have real time actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.

Go here to learn more: Mention

Google Analytics

(Google Analytics)

With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that powerful and free tools like Google Analytics can help you track posts made to your social accounts.

Hootsuite has published a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to track social media links with Google Analytics on their blog.

Facebook Insights

(Facebook)

Facebook not only lets you integrate share, like, and follow social media plugins and commenting features with your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you see how your campaigns are performing on Facebook’s social networking platform.

(Facebook.com – Insights)

Facebook Page Insights can be accessed by any page administrators and can help you improve your marketing efforts by allowing you to analyze page metrics like post reach, engagement, page likes, etc.

You can use Facebook’s Page Insights to learn about your posts — which have the most shares, likes, and comments and to learn about user demographics. You can then use this information to publish relevant posts to Facebook users.

To learn more, go here: Facebook Insights

Twitter Analytics

(Twitter Analytics)

Twitter Analytics let you see how your content is performing and provides a break down of your followers, tweet impressions, profile views, tweets, and tweets linking back to you.

Twitter’s Analytics dashboard also provides you with useful information about your tweets in the form of Tweet highlights, allowing you to plan your strategy for Twitter.

(Twitter Analytics – Tweet activity)

More info: Twitter Analytics

YouTube Analytics

(YouTube)

YouTube Analytics provides analytics to publishers.

You can see demographics, views, traffic sources, average video viewing time, earnings from playbacks, and more.

Go here to learn more: YouTube Analytics

Pinterest Analytics

(Pinterest.com)

Pinterest Analytics helps you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what people like from your profile, and what they save from your website. You can get information that helps you learn who your audience is and what they want.

For more details, visit this website: Pinterest Analytics

Additional Social Media Web Applications

Many new tools and technologies are being launched each year to help businesses take advantage of social media.

Here are some other social media-related applications. Keep in mind that web technologies are continually evolving. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know.

Wunderlist

A task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create personal and professional to-do lists and share these lists with colleagues, friends and family.

SDL/Alterian

SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that allows you to create engaging digital experiences with your customers.

Answerbase

Create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse Q&A content, and get their questions answered.

Appinions

Appinions, makers of an influence analytics marketing platform built on patented natural language processing and social network analysis technology was acquired by ScribbleLive, a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content online. You can optimize campaigns by quickly finding, tracking and connecting with opinion leaders who are most likely to influence a trend, idea, product or brand. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, “where should we publish?”, etc.

ViralHeat

Viralheat is a powerful data analytics tool that delivers insights from social media analytics. It is a highly scalable social media analytics and management platform. Viralheat offers predictive social analytics and a comprehensive social media management stream combining monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Users can access metrics and KPI, monitor conversations, schedule and publish updates, and deliver presentation-ready reports.

Bambuser

Bambuser lets you broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and engage with your viewers. Share via your smart device and stream content to your blog.

BlogDash

BlogDash brings brands and bloggers together. Bloggers can choose the types of opportunities they are open to being contacted about.

BrandWatch

Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that lets you collect, analyze and report on your social media data.

Buzzflash

Buzzflash is part of the Truthout community – an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines aimed at inspiring direct action.

CircleCount

CircleCount helps users better understand how to use Google+. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google Plus circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being tracked on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of your Google+ profile and it will start tracking your circles.

Commun.it

Commun.it lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on influencers and customers, schedule posts and manage multiple profiles, and view Twitter analytics data.

Contax.io

Contax.io is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your followers and friends on Twitter and provides detail to help you decide when to follow back.

Conversocial

Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help global brands improve their customer experience and operational efficiency by managing the flow of customer service enquiries and social media discussions on channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

SocialStudio

Social Studio lets you discover what consumers are saying about your brand, your products, and your competitors, and empower your team to plan, execute, and track compelling social media marketing..

Disqus

Disqus integrates with WordPress and can be used instead of the built-in WordPress commenting system to expand the power of social discussions online. Millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable use Disqus.

Echofon

Echofon provides users with social apps for Facebook and Twitter. Echofon apps notify you of mentions and messages. Echofon for Twitter automatically keeps unread tweets in sync between apps on different devices, makes viewing and sharing photos, videos, locations, and links simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides simple, streamlined navigation and an uncluttered Facebook experience, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post videos and photos.

Everytime

Everytime is a collaboration app for creatives. With Everytime, you can save moments from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media on your computer. Those moments can then be easily shared, discussed, and found online using social collaboration.

Meltwater Icerocket

Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which lets you search Facebook, Twitter, the blogosphere, or all at once for any keywords you like.

GroupHigh

GroupHigh is a blogger outreach software that lets you search, sort, and filter to find and prioritize your blogger outreach based on which bloggers are active and building communities on popular social networks. GroupHigh makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on location, content, topics, and more.

Klout

Klout is a website, mobile app, and social media monitoring and performance analyzing tool. Klout brings influencers and brands together, rewards experts in specific topics and areas of interests with Perks, and ranks users social influence using a “Klout Score”. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your audience hasn’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares change your Klout Score.

KnowAboutIt

KnowAboutIt lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are gathered from the KnowAboutIt system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.

LiveFyre

LiveFyre lets you access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.

TailWind

Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing, analytics, and management tool. It lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure results across Pinterest.

ViralWoot

Viralwoot helps you grow Pinterest followers, promote Pinterest pins, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a bookmarklet, create pin alerts, find which are your top performing boards and pins, connect with influencers, and more.

TweetReach

TweetReach allows you to measure how well your tweets, hashtags, keywords, and search queries are doing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for any given query.

Keyhole

Keyhole’s real-time dashboard shows how many people posted with your hashtag, along with the number of Retweets, Likes and Impressions your campaign is generating on Twitter and Instagram. Analytics are presented in an easy to understand visual reports.

Riffle

Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform (Sparkcentral, Spredfast, MarketMeSuite, etc) and provides you with insight into the current and potential value of Twitter users, engagement, and real-time social monitoring tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.

Merchii

Merchii lets you link consumers, bloggers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. Approved users can earn money from every purchase made.

MutualMind

MutualMind is a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution provides users with all the tools they need to display data on collaborative screens, detect trends or moments in social data and instantly route insights back to the enterprise.

Unified Social / PageLevel

PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, was acquired by Unified Social in January 2013. Since then, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated with Unified Social’s operating platform. These tools are part of a complete marketing suite for top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.

Refollow

Refollow provides powerful tools designed to help you grow and manage your social media presence.

RetweetRank

Get insights into your tweets, track engagement and monitor your brand with Retweet Rank.

Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.

SimplyMeasured

SimplyMeasured provides a powerful social analytics solution for global brands.

SocialBakers

SocialBakers delivers powerful social media analytics that tell you how your social performance stacks against wider industry benchmarks and the competition. You can create, manage, and optimize all of your Twitter and Facebook ads in one place, quickly identify your best content and top posting times, gain insights about your audience, and track your brand’s performance over the long term.

Synthesio

Synthesio is a social media intelligence tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of global agencies and brands. Users can cut through the social noise, find conversations that matter, measure digital reputation, manage consumer relationships and boost the ROI of their social activities.

Sysomos

Sysomos provides powerful social media analytics that lets you monitor, analyze, gather insights and make decisions that allow you to create better services and products for your customers. Simply type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both in real-time and historically on any topic across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and get insights into communities that matter to you.

ThisMoment

ThisMoment provides brands with opportunities to engage their customers online. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you to find, mix and share a variety of content through many channels across the Enterprise.

Trackur

Trackur provides simple, affordable, and fast social media monitoring of all social media and mainstream news, including Facebook, GooglePlus, Twitter and many more.

TrapIt

Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With the click of a button, your teams can share content with their prospects, customers, and social networks.

Tweepi

With Tweepi, you can follow a @user’s followers, follow a @user’s friends, follow using a Twitter list, and follow by copy/pasting a list.

Followadder

Followadder provides users with automated social networking management tools. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, follow/unfollow Instagram users, schedule posts, like back photos, access automated photo liker and automated direct message, create lists, search by hashtag, and more.

Twellow

Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow lets you search for followers on Twitter in dozens of relevant business categories or search your geographical area.

TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet was acquired by SumAll, and provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that lets you visualize your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts along with any other social service you use. You can quickly discover which of your posts, tweets, videos or photos get the most engagement.

TwitterFall

Twitterfall is a UK-based service that lets users on Twitter access upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users in the form of tweets.

Wajam

Wajam is a tool that displays search results based on what your friends share above your normal search results.

Addictomatic

Instantly create a page with the latest buzz on any topic.

Bitly

Bitly lets you share, track and analyze your links.

MyTopTweet

My Top Tweet shows your best performing tweets.

SocialMention

SocialMention is a real-time social media search engine and analysis platform.

Twazzup

Twazzup provides real-time monitoring and analytics for Twitter.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a powerful tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.

***

We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about using the WordPress software to grow your business online, please see other tutorials and articles we have published on this site.

***

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected global economy, you need to build and engage with a community around your company, brand, and services, all based around “listening”.

Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give you instant access to the latest information about your products or services.

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or services on social media, be alerted to disasters, spot new opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, topics, businesses, or products.

As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by a cross-section of people including market researchers, marketing professionals, PR companies, professional sales reps, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed affordable tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify what consumers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about your brand or products allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.

In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that are worth knowing about.

WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use 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 using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.

Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social business marketing opportunities.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.

Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks With WordPress

WordPress comes with built-in social features, like 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.

WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• Extended Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• User Groups
• Friend Connections
• Discussion Forums
• Notifications
• Many Add-On Features

BuddyPress is known 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 platform.

WPSymposium Pro

(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)

WP Symposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Mail
• Notification Bar
• Directory
• Groups
• Online Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels

With most social media platforms, syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.

If you want to run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across social media channels using WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Social media monitoring tools allow you to discover what your market wants, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay ahead of many competitors.

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 tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these apps will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Reputation And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise

Building your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.

You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations for 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.

Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.

An expertly configured WordPress site lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.

(Automate content syndication across social media with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)

Spy On Your Competition

Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to discover and and perhaps also reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities and thought leaders in your niche.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

Recruitment companies research social media 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 can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

What About “Going Viral” Online?

Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience 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 Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content. In this course we also explore 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 – Not Just For Global Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)

Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

Online Reputation Management

You have probably heard the term 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 tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.

If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative with an excess of 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 discover 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 spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Many companies all over the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.

Monitoring conversations and new conversations on social media extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. The ability to monitor the reputation of of average individuals is also important. For example, consider the scenarios below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute feels 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 an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.

How good is your reputation online?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Management Of User Feedback

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, 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 and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on social media, yesterday’s must-have new thing suddenly stops trending and gets replaced with the new “new” thing, services get discontinued, people retire, and so on.

All of this provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (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 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 an authoritative 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Section 1

In part two we explore WordPress resources and media measurement. To read more, click on this link: WordPress Social Media Tracking Resources – Part 2

***