The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your company, services, and brand.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spy on the competition, avert crises, measure the impact of campaigns, and identify opportunities for engagement. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor trends, activity, and social conversations on social media channels like blogging, forums, social networking sites, micro-blogging platforms, discussion boards, video sites, 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 various people including PR companies, marketing teams, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed a range of tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your products or brand so you can react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use content publishing 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.
For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, go here: The Small Business Owner’s Guide To Understanding WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of 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 Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Networks 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Run your own online social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
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 regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. There are 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 time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that allow users to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your content on various social media networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social marketing tools allow you to discover what your audience wants, identify new trends and opportunities and stay one step 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 those social networks.
Additionally, there are applications that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Building your business brand and online reputation, 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 meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community finds out about it.
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 blog can help establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automate your web content syndication across social media with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and and maybe even reverse engineer the success strategies of experts and thought leaders in your niche.
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. Connecting with others through social channels can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Go Viral” Online Faster
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands and corporations have failed dismally.
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, compelling, informative or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 shows you how to create useful and compelling content. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
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 will tell 10 more people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your 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 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 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business/brand and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not effectively managing their digital reputations.
Monitoring conversations and interactions on social media extends beyond large brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. For example, consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 enough good, positive things published online either to help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have an online reputation management strategy in place?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate 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 research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 (have you noticed how all 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 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 website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore 29 social media monitoring resources for WordPress users. To read the rest of this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Resources For Monitoring Social Indicators – Part 2
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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)