The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your brand, company, and products.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers 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 gain insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, assess competitor activity, spot market opportunities, and avert impending crises. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, social media signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including digital reputation specialists, market researchers, marketing professionals, professional sales reps, social media marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed tools that facilitate the active tracking of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use CMS 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 WordPress is the vehicle that can help your small business grow and succeed online, go here: How To Grow Your Business Using A WordPress Blog
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 Your Social Media Networks 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Run an online social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium offers 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
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously 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 your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of great plugins that allow users to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication on various social channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Using social tools allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay one step 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 are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many apps will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, and listen to their conversations to gain 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress website can automate your web content syndication on various social networks.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to observe and discover the success strategies of authorities and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, 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 the next section of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content. 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 info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about 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 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 it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative with positive content, 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security-related departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 support the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you have a system to manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Client Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral on social media, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (have you noticed how all news media outlets 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 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 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 site or brand 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 1
In part two we explore media resources for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media Monitoring – Part Two
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)