The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your business is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s highly connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your company, services, and brand.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, identify market opportunities, be alerted to crises, and spy on your competitors. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, topics, brands, or products.
As a tool for business intelligence, social signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include marketing teams, market researchers, digital reputation management companies, agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed a range of tools to facilitate the monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their brands or products so they can react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business,etc.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible 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 too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your small business grow online, go here: Using WordPress – A Business Owner’s Guide
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.
Pitch Your Services And Products 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, Pinterest 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 content for social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- 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 open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, 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 marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to drive most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your web content across social channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social tools and applications allows you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify trends and new 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 your social pages.
Additionally, many applications are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many applications and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Brand And Online Reputation
Strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic 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 online and how you respond to other user’s 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 poorly and end up paying a heavy price when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automate content syndication across various social channels with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you observe and discover the success strategies of experts and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time researching social media and studying the 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 can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Go Viral” Online Faster
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large 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, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content. In this course we also explore many ways to create content that has 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 Global Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
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 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 competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work 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 reducing the negative effects with positive content, 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 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 can help you. If you Google yourself 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 website or person directly, etc.
Companies everywhere are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. 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 a lot of 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” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Managing your digital reputation is becoming more important in the digital economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business through effective user review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral on Twitter, 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 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 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 Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress social media monitoring tools. To continue reading this article, click here: Media Tracking Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part Two
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