The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page about your company or products is not enough. To succeed in today’s connected global economy, you need to build, nurture and engage with a social community around your services, brand, and company, all based around ”listening” to their needs and feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competition, identify opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to track social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of groups that include online reputation management companies, market research, marketing professionals, professional sales reps, social media marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and very easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Learning WordPress – The Business Owner’s Guide
Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress includes 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, Pinterest 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 social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Use this free WordPress plugin to set up and manage an online 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that encourage users to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see 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 channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Use social monitoring tools to discover what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay 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 pages.
Also, there are applications and tools that let you survey customers online. Many of these apps can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility Online And Showcase Your Talent
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automate web content syndication on social media with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and discover what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral “Hit”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, engaging, entertaining or “spot-on”, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content with 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 activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard the term 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 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 will tell 10 more people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if this goes 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 companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative effects with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 your name or your business/brand and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses around the world are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody battle 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 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 anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Are you managing your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what 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 promoted, 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 and becomes relevant again, 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 media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical 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 may end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore media resources that can help grow your business online. To read more, click here: 30 Social Media Tracking Tools For WordPress – Part Two
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