The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s interconnected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your brand, services, and company.
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 news around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, be alerted to crises, spy on the competition, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spot market opportunities. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, products, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by a cross-section of groups that include market research, marketing professionals, online reputation management (ORM) companies, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various service providers have developed many tools that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content publishing 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.
To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article and a WordPress site, 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.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks 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, 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 tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free WordPress plugin helps you run your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- Member 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.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media tools 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 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 plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication on various social networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tools and services to discover 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 your social networking sites.
Additionally, many applications are available that let you run surveys online. Many of these apps will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility And Showcase Your Talent
Building your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a 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 for 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price when the online community finds out about it.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site can help establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automate web content syndication across various social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to observe and even reverse engineer what experts and leaders in your niche are doing right.
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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral”?
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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss many 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 Big 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 (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management. 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 it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors 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 work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative impact with an excess of 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 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 around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you have an digital reputation management strategy in place?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. More information: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 added 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 media tracking resources for business owners. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: Essential Social Media Resources Every WordPress User Should Know About – Part 2
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum