The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s connected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your company, brand, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or products on social media, spy on the competition, spot market opportunities, avert crises, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including digital reputation management (ORM) companies, market research, marketing professionals, professional sales reps, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various providers have made available many tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Management Tools & Applications
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog 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 for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform 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, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network 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
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium 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 social features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many 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 makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that encourage users to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication across social media networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Use social media marketing tools and services to listen to what your target audience wants, identify new trends and 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 networking sites.
Additionally, many apps are available that let you survey customers online. Many tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Brand And Credibility Online
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, 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 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 other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you automatically distribute your web content across various social media networks.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and and perhaps even be inspired by the success strategies of experts and thought leaders 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. Using social media to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Go Viral” Online Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “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 campaign 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 study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, informative or even funny, 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 will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring activities 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 the saying 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 competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage 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 brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Are you effectively managing your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management For WordPress
Monitoring Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 (have you noticed how all news sites 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore dozens of media resources every WordPress user should know about. To continue reading this article, click here: Media Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now