The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page on your website about your company is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s interconnected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your company, brand, and products.
Social media 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 around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, products, or brand on social media, be alerted to crises, assess competitor activity and mind share, identify opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor social media channels like blogging, internet forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms, message boards, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 research, PR agencies, professional sales reps, social engagement and community personnel, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many providers have created tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to identify what consumers are saying about your brand or products so you can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and really easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, see this article: Everything You Need To Know About Growing Your Business Online Using WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article, 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 for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience 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, 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.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
Many social media platforms 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 manage most of your social marketing strategy 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 Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content on various social networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Social tools allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and 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 those social networks.
Also, there are tools that let you survey customers online. Many of these apps will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Online Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 and how you respond online 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 being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community gets hold of the news.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. 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 very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automate web content syndication across various social networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and and maybe even be inspired by the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders 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. Connecting with others through social channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed.
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, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore many 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 – Not Just For Global Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing 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 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. People or competing businesses 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 now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative impact with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses all over the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. There’s also the online reputation of average individuals. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what people are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage user reviews. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Understanding Online Trends
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 information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on social media, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (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 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 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 other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress resources and social media tracking. To continue reading, click on this link: Best Social Media Measurement Tools 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