The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a web page with static information. To succeed in today’s interconnected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a social community around your brand, products, and company.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest information about your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, and identify potential market opportunities. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social 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 groups that include marketing teams, PR agencies, market research, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the active tracking of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and really easy to use content publishing 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 please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, 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 makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networks.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free plugin can be used to run a social network 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 an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of 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 has many plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication across various social channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media marketing tools to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step 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 your social pages.
Additionally, there are apps that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Online Reputation
Building and strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. 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 and how you respond to users online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as 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 very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you automate web content syndication on various social channels.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and discover the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
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 channels can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
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 are outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands and corporations have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, entertaining or even funny, 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss ways to create content that has 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 Big Businesses
(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 Digital 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 many individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 will tell 10 more people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation 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 stop negative things being said about you 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business/brand 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 person directly, etc.
Companies all around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. Being able to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what customers are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective customer review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new 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 release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 (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 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part two we explore WordPress social media measurement and resources. To continue reading this article, click here: Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum