The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s connected digital world, you need to build and nurture a social community around your company, brand, and products and ”listen” to their feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest information around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, identify potential market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on your competitors, and be alerted to disasters. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, social monitoring 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 marketing professionals, online reputation specialists, market research, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of providers have created affordable tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to track what is being said online about their products or brands so they can react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Monitoring Tools
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content management 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: WordPress For Small Business Owners – The Beginner’s Guide To Growing A Successful Small Business Using A WordPress Site
Using some of the tools listed here 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.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience 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, 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 article titles and descriptions for various 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 network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free WordPress plugin lets you run a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium 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 Messaging
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many 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 strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow users to easily share your web 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 distribute content across various social media channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social media tracking tools to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and 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, many applications and tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. 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 be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automate web content syndication on social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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. Connecting with others through social media channels can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many 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 or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget 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, compelling, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 will show you how to create useful and engaging content. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management. If you haven’t, you will be hearing 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 is being said about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. 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 things online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative effects with an excess of positive material, 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 come in. If you Google your name 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.
Businesses everywhere are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 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 a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you know what customers are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. More information: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management For WordPress
Predicting Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps 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, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 (how many news media broadcasters 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 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 information that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore social media monitoring resources for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org