The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a web page with static information. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your company, products, and brand.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, be alerted to crises, and identify market opportunities. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific topics, businesses, brands, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include PR companies, marketing teams, market researchers, agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different service providers have made available a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the active tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict what is being said online about their products or brands allowing them to respond to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Tracking Tools
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, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your business grow online, go here: How To Grow Your Business Using WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into the full power of social media.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Social Media 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
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 Messages
- User Groups
- Friend 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 plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to drive your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content across various social media networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social marketing tools and services to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and 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 your social accounts.
Additionally, there are many tools that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent
Building your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, 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 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 paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress website can automate your content syndication across social channels.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you 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 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 grow 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 marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands have failed to take off.
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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. 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 – Not Just For Big Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). 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 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 tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to 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, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative effects 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 name 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.
Companies are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they are not monitoring their online reputations.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. Being able to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the scenarios 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you know what visitors are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective user review management. Visit this page to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
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 say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 can provide 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 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 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 site or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore top social media measurement tools for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Tracking Tools – Part 2
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie