The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static web page about your business and services is not enough. To achieve business success in today’s connected world, you need to build a community around your brand, products, and company, based around “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give you direct access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, avert disasters, spy on your competitors, spot opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of campaigns. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social media channels like blogging, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms, message 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 online reputation specialists, marketing professionals, market researchers, agencies, social engagement and community staff, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your products or brand allowing you to respond to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management 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.
To learn more about why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: WordPress – The Business Owner’s Guide
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is 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 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 networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social community 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- 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 Channels
Many social media tools 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 drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that encourage users to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content on various social media channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social tools and applications allows you to listen to what your market wants, identify 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.
Also, there are tools that let you run surveys online. Many apps and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Building your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, 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 other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, but it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog can help establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automate content syndication on various social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of experts and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies research social media 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.
What About “Going Viral”?
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 are completely 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 big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, informative or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this free 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard of 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 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 left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to 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 image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing 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 or your brand 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 come in. 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 person directly, etc.
Companies everywhere are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. Consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 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 any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Managing your online reputation should not be ignored if you want your business to grow.
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 can provide 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 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 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 Part One
In the next section we explore 30 media tools for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Monitoring : Useful Tools – 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