The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a page on your site with static information about your business and services is not enough. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to grow and nurture a social community around your brand, company, and products, based around actively ”listening” to their feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz 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, spot market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, assess competitor activity and mind share, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, products, topics, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social activity, social conversations, and trends on social media channels like blogging, forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., discussion boards, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 market researchers, marketing professionals, digital reputation management companies, sales teams, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many technology companies have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Media Monitoring Tools & Applications
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and 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.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, see this article: Everything You Need To Know About Growing Your Small Business With A WordPress Blog
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into the new social business 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.
Promote Your Products And Services To The Right Audience 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely 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 WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- User 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.
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 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 users to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See 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 on social media with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social tools allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay ahead of 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 conduct surveys and polls online. Many tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Online Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations for 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 stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automate your content syndication across social networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and discover the success strategies of authorities and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral”?
Many 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 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 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 in your audience 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content. 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 information, 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
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said 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 tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses 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 diluting the negative effects with an excess of 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 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 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 person directly, etc.
Many businesses everywhere are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they ignore their online reputations.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the online reputation of individuals. 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 help your case.
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 about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, 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 and new content ideas (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular content with additional 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore social media tracking resources for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: Essential Media Tracking Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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