The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your products, company, and brand.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spot market opportunities, avert disasters, measure the impact of campaigns, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social media monitoring 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 people including market researchers, online reputation managers, marketing teams, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to respond 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 you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Management Tools & Applications
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use CMS 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.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, go here: WordPress For Business Owners – The Beginner’s Guide To Building Your Successful Business Using WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social 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.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 images 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 completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and run your own social community on your site.
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.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need 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 posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that encourage users to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 web content syndication across social media using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social tools and services to discover 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 apps and tools are available that let you survey customers online. Many of these tools will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 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 customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automatically syndicate your content across various social channels with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you 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 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 name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
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 money 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.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users 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 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 shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also explore ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
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 posted 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if things go 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 good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative impact with 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/brand name 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 businesses all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 enough 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” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Managing online reputation is important in the web economy.
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective customer review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
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 announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, 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 (have you noticed how all news media channels now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular content with added 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or brand 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 Section One
In the next section we explore media measurement tools for business owners. To read more, click here: Media Tracking Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
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