The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a web page with static information. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected world, you need to build an engaged social community around your company, brand, and products, all based around ”listening” to their feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest information about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, services, or brand on social media, identify market opportunities, spy on the competition, avert disasters, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to track activity on social media channels like blogs, forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms, discussion boards, video/photo sharing websites, and user-generated content 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 market researchers, marketing teams, PR companies, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed tools that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track consumer behavior around your products or brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and extremely 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.
To learn more about using the WP platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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, 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 various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress can be used to run a social community on your website.
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 regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides 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 features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools 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 your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 automate your web content syndication across various social media networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Social measuring tools and services allow you to discover what your market wants, identify new 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.
Also, many apps are available that let you survey customers online. Many applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Online Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. 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 to comments and discussions online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automate your web content syndication across social media using an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you observe and learn what experts and leaders in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Online Viral “Hit”?
Most 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 are out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally 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, 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging 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 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)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 others are saying about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now 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 weakening the negative impact with an excess of 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business 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 website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses all over the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what customers are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user reviews. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Monitoring Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting 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 publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (how many news media broadcasters 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 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 website 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 Part One
In part two we explore best social media monitoring resources for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement Tools – Part 2
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