The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your services, company, and brand.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest information about your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, brand, or company on social media, identify new opportunities for engagement, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, products, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social media 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, market researchers, online reputation management (ORM) companies, social engagement and community personnel, professional sales reps, and agencies. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different providers have developed affordable tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 business goals online, go here: Understanding WordPress – The Business Owner’s Guide
Using some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the full power social media 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 Social Media With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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 various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend 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 an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many 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 drive most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow your site visitors to 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 your content on social media channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Social tools and services allow you to discover what your market 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 those social networks.
Additionally, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Brand And Credibility Online
Strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automatically distribute content on various social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to discover and and perhaps even reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, 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 media channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Go Viral” Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, informative 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard the term online reputation management. 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 if what is being posted is negative. 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative effects with an excess of positive content, 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 yourself or your business and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have an online reputation management strategy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Client Feedback Management
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated 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 (have you noticed how all news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 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 others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore social media tracking tools for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: Top Social Media Measurement Resources For WordPress Users – Part Two
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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