The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static web page about your company and products is no longer enough. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected digital economy, you need to build and nurture a social community around your company, products, and brand, based around “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest information about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or products on social media, spot new market opportunities, be alerted to impending crises, measure the impact of campaigns, and spy on your competition. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, digital reputation managers, marketing professionals, social engagement and community personnel, professional sales reps, and social marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed a range of affordable and even free tools to facilitate the monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, enabling you to identify what is being said online about your brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your small business grow and succeed online, see this article: Learn How To Grow Your Small Business With WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes 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, 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 social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friendship 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- User 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
Many social media tools 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 run your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that encourage users to easily share your content online 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 content syndication on social media channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tools and applications to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay 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.
Additionally, there are many apps that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these applications and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, 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 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you automate web content syndication across various social networks.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and discover the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Go Viral” Online Faster
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands and corporations 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, compelling, informative or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling 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 details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard about online reputation management (ORM). 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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/brand name and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses all over the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of average individuals is also very important. Consider the following scenarios:
- 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 enough 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” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Are you ignoring your digital reputation?
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 services through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy User Reviews Management
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 release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Twitter, 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 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 may end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore WordPress social media monitoring and resources. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress – Part 2
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