The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a web page with static information. To succeed in today’s connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your company, products, and brand.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news about your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, identify market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, and help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by embittered customers. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, businesses, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include PR staff, market research, marketing professionals, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very easy to use CMS 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 the benefits of using the WordPress web content management platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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 provides 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up your own social network on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
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 regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online 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, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. 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 a considerable amount of 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 a number of plugins that encourage users to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content across social media networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Social tracking tools and services allow you to discover what your audience wants, identify new 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 those social networks.
Additionally, many applications and tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility Online And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust 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 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 online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, but it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate content on various social networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays 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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands 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, engaging, informative or “spot-on”, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content with 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 – Not Just For Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
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 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 tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative impact with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 your name or your business/brand and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-related departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Are you effectively managing your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage user reviews. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (have you noticed how all 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 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 may 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 content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part 2 we explore WordPress social media monitoring and useful resources. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: Best Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress – 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