The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your business or services is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s connected digital world, you need to build a social community around your company, services, and brand, based around actively “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, avert crises, identify new market opportunities, and spy on the competition. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track conversations and social activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms, message boards, video/photo sharing 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 a cross-section of people including market researchers, marketing teams, online reputation management (ORM) agencies, agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of service providers have made available tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about your brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies 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 manage content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, see this article: Using WordPress – A Business Owner’s Guide
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to explore the full power of marketing your business on social media.
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 Products And Services To The Right 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website 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:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium 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 features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share 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 manage your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many great plugins that allow users to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication on social channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social monitoring tools allow you to discover what your audience wants, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step ahead of 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.
Additionally, there are many tools that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Reputation And Brand Online
Strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automatically syndicate your web content across social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to observe and and maybe even be inspired by what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands and corporations have failed.
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, engaging, informative 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard about online reputation management. 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 negative comments, reviews, etc.. 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. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies 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 with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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 and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies all around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they are not managing their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of average individuals. 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 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 any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you know what visitors are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective user review management. To learn more, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Reviews Management For WordPress
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of which 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 get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news sites 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 an authoritative 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social monitoring resources. To read more, click here: Media Tracking Resources For WordPress Users – Part Two
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now