The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your brand, company, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give you instant access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, spy on the competition, spot opportunities for engagement, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, and measure the impact of campaigns. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social media 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, professional sales reps, agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many providers have made available tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their brands so they can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and really easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your small business grow online, see this article: WordPress For Business – An Online Guide To Building A Successful Business With WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the new social business 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.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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 article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Use BuddyPress to set up and run your own social community on your site.
BuddyPress is known 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 contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication on various social media channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social monitoring tools and services allows you to listen to what your audience wants, identify new opportunities and stay 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 those social networks.
Additionally, there are many apps that let you survey customers online. Many apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Building your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. 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 online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community gets hold of the news.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automate content syndication on various social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to observe and discover what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time researching social media and studying the 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 increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands and corporations have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 Part 2 of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many ways to create content with 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 – Not Just For Big Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online 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 if what is being said 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. People or competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening 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 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 yourself or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies all over the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the reputation of individuals. Consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How well are you managing your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing User Reviews
Online Trend Monitoring
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 promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 and new content ideas (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 an authoritative destination or resource for your niche or industry. People may end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or brand 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 Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement resources. To continue reading this article, click here: 25+ Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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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