The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected global economy, you need to build an engaged community around your services, brand, and company, based around actively ”listening” to what they have to say.
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 information around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spot potential market opportunities, avert impending crises, assess competitor activity, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, businesses, topics, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, social monitoring 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 people including online reputation management (ORM) agencies, marketing professionals, market research, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed tools that facilitate the monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, enabling companies to identify what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their brands allowing them to react to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to explore the full power social media 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 A Wider Audience On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress includes 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, Pinterest 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 content for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(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 Messaging
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social 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 run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that encourage your site visitors 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 your content across social media networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Using social media marketing tools allows you to listen to what your audience wants, identify trends and new business 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 your social networking sites.
Also, there are applications that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many applications can be integrated with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand Online
Strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of 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. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price 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 website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you automatically syndicate content on various social channels.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, informative or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also explore 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 Global Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- 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 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 more people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you 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 yourself or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses around the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not effectively managing their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the reputation of individuals. For example, 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 enough good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have an digital reputation management strategy in place?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Customer Reviews Management
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new 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 videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 (how many news media channels 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 information that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part 2 we explore social media tracking resources for WordPress. To read more, click on this link: Top Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress – Part 2
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