Tag: WordPress Social Media Tools

In Part One of this article, we looked at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.

In this section, we examine a number of tracking tools, services and applications that allow you to:

• Search, find, segment, organize and target users according to specific demographic criteria, psychographics, etc.
• Monitor and listen to online social conversations
• Identify consumer buying signals.

With this information, you can engage in meaningful conversations with buyers and pitch them your message.

Let’s move on now to some of the actual tools and applications you can use to monitor social media content. If you’ve been searching for ways to improve your business results with social media, then check out this list of more than 25 free or cost-effective social analytics tools for business owners.

Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress

(Discover what people are saying about you, your brand, or your competition on social media)

Is there a free, simple and easy way to know what is new in your niche or industry so that you are not wasting a huge amount of time doing research? Yes, there is, and it’s called …

Google Alerts

(You can monitor the web for new content with Google Alerts)

Google Alerts is a free, simple and useful tool for keeping up-to-date with news and information about all kinds of topics, staying informed about people, brands and companies, and monitoring what is being published about you and your business online.

Google Alerts is not only great for helping you manage your reputation online, but also for automatically sourcing information about people, companies, and any other topic you are following.

With Google Alerts, you just subscribe to a keyword or topic and you’re done. Whenever Google’s indexing robots crawl a new web site, news update, press release, blog post, a video, tweet, or any other content related to that topic, it will automatically send you an email or RSS update.

We’ve created a simple tutorial on setting up Google alerts here: A Simple And Easy Tutorial On Setting Up Google Alerts

Hootsuite

(Hootsuite)

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage all of your social media profiles from an intuitive dashboard.

Hootsuite provides solutions for social media management, social marketing, social selling, and social customer service. Users can schedule Tweets and Facebook posts, track conversations, create and customize analytics reports, streamline workflows amongst teams, departments, or regions, assign tasks, receive real-time notifications, have internal conversations from the dashboard, and collaborate with team members.

Hootsuite is one of the most used social media management tools (SMMT). It allows you to post to a large number of social networks (including their app directory), and provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and more.

Go here for more info: Hootsuite

Buffer

(Buffer.com)

Buffer lets you schedule social content. Add updates to your Buffer queue and it will be posted for you.

You can schedule updates for a day, week, or month. Scheduling times are preset, but you can change these in your settings. In addition to a web interface, Buffer is also available as a browser extension and as a mobile app.

For more information, go here: Buffer

Social Metrics Pro

(SocialMetrics)

Social Metrics is a plugin for WordPress that tracks social signals from many leading social networks like Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon.

Some of the powerful features included in SocialMetricsPro include Excel-like conditional formatting, built-in and external widgets, sort, search and filter data, export data capabilities, 1-click auto-update functionality, and a simple social search improvement system.

We have written a comprehensive article about Social Metrics Pro. Go here to learn more about this plugin: Social Metrics Pro

Sociocaster

(Sociocaster)

Posting to your Linkedin, Twitter, WordPress, and Facebook accounts is time-consuming and to get all of these tasks done usually requires using different software, applications, or plugins. Sociocaster lets you do it all from one single dashboard.

Sociocaster includes loads of powerful marketing and social features: image-sharing design templates, the ability to spy on your competitors, built-in likes, comments, favorites, and retweets checking tool, unlimited social account management (agency license), and much more.

For more details, go here: Sociocaster

SproutSocial

(SproutSocial.com)

SproutSocial is a premium tool aimed at small to large businesses as well as the enterprise sector.

SproutSocial has a built-in CRM, advanced scheduling tools, monitoring, support for teams and multiple profiles, helpdesk for customer support, team collaboration tools, permission levels and roles, reports and analytics, mobile apps, RSS feed integration, etc.

Go here for more info: SproutSocial

SocialReport

(SocialReport.com)

SocialReport is a social intelligence platform that lets you track and manage all of your social network accounts from one place.

Social Report tracks the performance of your Facebook pages and Twitter profiles, business reviews, website performance and blogs, and displays your social channel data using a simple and intuitive dashboard. You can organize your data by business or customers, and track your own social profiles as well as competitor profiles.

More information: SocialReport

Followerwonk

(Followerwonk)

Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tools that lets you search Twitter bios to connect with anyone, compare Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers, view interactive charts of new followers and unfollows, contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends, and explore and grow your social graph..

More info: Followerwonk

ManageFlitter

(ManageFlitter)

ManageFlitter provides a set of powerful tools that help you work smarter and faster with Twitter.

ManageFlitter lets you sort followers and following lists by a range of criteria, find out when most of your followers are online and schedule tweets appropriately, easily search inside your Twitter stream to find and follow influencers for your business, use tweet analytics to track keywords and beat your competitors, find out who isn’t following you back, and more.

Go here for more information: ManageFlitter

Beevolve

(Beevolve)

Beevolve is a social monitoring tool designed for SMBs, content marketers, online marketers, community managers, and analysts. It allows you to track your social media mentions, schedule and launch social media posts, and measure resulting engagement, sales, and conversion ROI, buzz, social sentiment, and more of posts from one easy-to-use platform.

Go here to learn more: Beevolve

HowSociable

(HowSociable)

HowSociable is a simple tool that allows you to see brand mentions across various social platforms.

How Sociable displays brand viability metrics. It delivers you a “social magnitude” score that lets you know how well you are doing on social media, and which areas you can improve your marketing on.

To learn more, visit this site: HowSociable

Mention

(Mention.com)

Mention is a social media monitoring tool for all kinds of businesses, CEOs, agencies, marketers, etc..

Mention’s algorithms take billions of data points into account, so when someone mentions your brand online, you have access to real time, intelligent and actionable data that can help you with your business goals. Mention is cross-device compatible.

More information: Mention

Google Analytics

(Google Analytics)

With so many great social media monitoring tools available, it’s easy to forget that free and powerful tools like Google Analytics can also help you track posts made to your social media accounts.

Visit the Hootsuite blog to read a useful tutorial on tracking social media links with Google Analytics.

Facebook Insights

(Facebook Insights)

Facebook not only lets you integrate share, like, and follow social plugins and commenting features with your website, it also provides a comprehensive analytics tool called Facebook Insights that lets you analyze how your site is performing on Facebook’s social platform.

(Facebook – Insight Types)

Facebook Insights can help you see when users are on Facebook. This helps you with your marketing efforts.

You can use Page Insights to learn about your posts — which are attracting the most likes, shares, and comments and to learn about about your audience. You can then use this information to publish targeted content to Facebook users.

More info: Facebook Insights

Twitter Analytics

(Twitter)

Twitter Analytics let you see how your tweets are performing and gives you a breakdown of your followers, profile visits, tweets, tweet impressions, and top tweets linking to you.

Twitter’s Analytics dashboard also provides you with useful information about your tweets in the form of Tweet highlights, allowing you to better plan your Twitter marketing strategy.

(Twitter – Tweet activity)

To learn more, visit this website: Twitter Analytics

YouTube Analytics

(YouTube)

YouTube Analytics provides analytic reports to video publishers.

You can monitor the performance of your channel and videos with up-to-date metrics and reports like the real time, overview, earnings, watch-time, and engagement reports.

Go here for more details: YouTube Analytics

Pinterest Analytics

(Pinterest Analytics)

Pinterest Analytics helps you explore metrics about the people who engage with your business, what Pins and boards people like most, and what they save from your website. You can get data about your audience so you can learn what they want more of.

To learn more, go here: Pinterest Analytics

Other Social Media Tools

With the explosive growth of social media predicted to continue rising, many new tools and technologies are being developed to help business engage and make sense of social data.

The list below contains a number of other social media applications. Keep in mind that web technologies are continually evolving. If anything changes in the list below, please let us know in the comment section.

Wunderlist

Wunderlist is a task management tool with a social twist. It lets you create professional and personal lists and share your lists with friends, colleagues and family.

SDL/Alterian

SDL acquired Alterian and transformed it into an all-in-one global web experience management solution that lets you create engaging digital experiences with online consumers.

Answerbase

Answerbase lets you create social Q&A communities. The Answerbase Q&A Platform allows users to ask questions, browse Q&A content, and get their questions answered.

Appinions

Appinions is a content marketing and live publishing SaaS platform that lets you plan, create and distribute content. Appinions’ technology allows customers to optimize all stages of the content marketing lifecycle. The ScribbleLive acquisition enables brands to view the web through the lens of people’s opinions. The software provides answers to questions like ”who should we listen to or partner with?”, ”what keywords do we use to make content discoverable?”, etc.

ViralHeat

Viralheat runs a powerful data analytics application that delivers insights from social media analytics. It is a highly scalable social media analytics and management platform. Viralheat offers predictive social analytics and a comprehensive social media management stream that combines monitoring, publishing, analytics and reporting for all major social networks in an intuitive interface. Customers can schedule and publish updates, follow conversations, access metrics and KPI, and deliver presentation-ready reports.

Bambuser

Broadcast live using your mobile device or webcam, share to your favorite social network or blog and engage with your viewers. Share via your smartphone and stream content to your blog.

BlogDash

BlogDash connects brands looking for ways to promote their services and products with bloggers willing to write content aimed at bringing brands positive media attention.

BrandWatch

Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform that allows you to collect, analyze and report on your social media data.

Buzzflash

Buzzflash is an independent platform for transformative ideas featuring daily headlines whose goal is to inspire direct social action and participation.

CircleCount

CircleCount is a Google+ education tool. CircleCount lets you discover all of the Google+ circles that include your profile. If your profile isn’t already being monitored on CircleCount.com, you can easily add the url of your GooglePlus profile and it will start tracking your circles.

Commun.it

Commun.it lets you manage your Twitter relationships, focus on influencers and customers, manage multiple profiles and schedule posts, and analyze Twitter data.

Contax.io

Contaxio is a contact management tool for your social networks that tracks your friends and followers on Twitter and provides detail that helps you decide when to follow back.

Conversocial

Conversocial provides cloud-based social customer service solutions that help brands improve customer experience and operational efficiency by managing customer service flow and discussions on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

SocialStudio

Social Studio lets you understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening on social media, then use that information to make better business decisions.

Disqus

Disqus is a free service that facilitates the growth and spread of online communities through blog discussions. Millions of websites covering just about every topic imaginable use Disqus.

Echofon

Echofon provides users with full featured, clean social apps for Facebook and Twitter. Echofon apps notify you of messages and mentions. Echofon for Twitter automatically keeps unread tweets in sync between apps on different devices, makes sharing media simple, and Echofon for Facebook provides simple, streamlined navigation and an uncluttered Facebook experience, browse your newsfeed and timelines, comment and like with ease and post photos or videos.

Everytime

Everytime is a creative social media tool. If you work with audio, videos, or images, you can save any moment from Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and any media to your computer. Those moments are then easy to share, publicly or privately, easy to discuss about and easy to find.

Meltwater Icerocket

Meltwater IceRocket is a social search engine which lets you search the blogosphere, Twitter, Facebook, or all of these for any keywords you like.

GroupHigh

With GroupHigh you can promote your company, clients, or products using a blogger outreach software that lets you sort, search, and filter to find and prioritize your blogger outreach based on which bloggers are active and building communities on popular social networks. GroupHigh’s blog search makes it easy to build a list of bloggers based on location, topics, content, and more.

Klout

Klout is a website and mobile app that uses social media analytics to rank its users according to online social influence using the “Klout Score”, which is a numerical value between 1 and 100. You can use Klout to suggest shareable content that your users haven’t seen yet, and track how retweets, likes, and shares change your Klout Score.

KnowAboutIt

KnowAboutIt lets you discover the most engaging and relevant content lost in your social stream. The stories are gathered from the Know About It system from the previous 24 hours, and are ranked by the number of comments that the KnowAboutIt system is aware of in relation to that story.

LiveFyre

LiveFyre lets you access user-generated content (UGC) from the social web.

TailWind

Tailwind is a Pinterest marketing, management, and analytics tool. Tailwind lets you schedule pins, monitor Pinterest analytics, analyze industry trends and measure performance and results.

ViralWoot

ViralWoot helps you grow Pinterest followers, add pins for promotion, manage and grow multiple accounts, schedule pins with a bookmarklet, track what people are pinning from your website, who is pinning the most and what images from your website are trending on Pinterest with pin alerts, find which are your top performing boards and pins, connect with influencers, and more.

TweetReach

TweetReach lets you measure how well your tweets, hashtags, keywords, and search queries are doing on Twitter. TweetReach estimates the potential reach of your tweets for your given query.

Keyhole

Keyhole is a real-time social media search tracking service that allows you to track #hashtags, URLs, and keywords on Twitter and Instagram. Analytic results are displayed to users in an easy to understand visual reports.

Riffle

Riffle integrates with every Twitter platform (SocialEngage, TweetDeck, Twilert, etc) and provides you with Twitter analytics, engagement, interest, and tracking tools. It integrates with most popular Twitter platforms allowing users to easily add it into their existing social media activities.

Merchii

Merchii lets you link bloggers, consumers, and online merchants by tagging images on the web. Merchii provides a financial incentive for creating social engagement. You can earn money from every purchase made.

MutualMind

MutualMind provides a complete social data platform that lets you monitor, analyze and engage with social media. One web-based solution provides you with all the tools you need to display data on collaborative screens, detect moments or trends in social data and route the insights back to the enterprise instantly.

Unified Social / PageLevel

PageLever, a leading Facebook analytics company, was acquired by Unified Social in January 2013. Since then, Pagelever’s comprehensive, real-time reporting has been integrated with Unified Social’s operating platform. These tools are part of a complete marketing suite allowing top global brands and agencies to aggregate, warehouse and activate their social data.

Refollow

Refollow provides powerful tools designed to help you grow and manage your social media presence.

RetweetRank

Find out how influential are you on Twitter.

Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics provides enterprise-level social and content marketing solutions and SEO/social media analytics.

SimplyMeasured

SimplyMeasured provides easy social media analytics for your data in one place.

SocialBakers

SocialBakers delivers deep, competitive social media stats that tell you how your social performance stacks against the competition and wider industry benchmarks. You can create, manage, and optimize all your Twitter and Facebook ads in one place, quickly identify your best content and top posting times, gain powerful insights about your audience, and track long-term brand performance.

Synthesio

Synthesio is a social media intelligence and social listening tool. Synthesio provides scalable monitoring and analytics solutions to hundreds of leading brands and agencies around the world. Users can cut through the social noise, find the conversations that matter, measure their online reputation, manage their consumer relationships and boost their social activities’ ROI.

Sysomos

Sysomos monitors billions of conversations and helps you monitor, analyze, gather insights and make decisions that allow you to create better services and products for your customers. Simply type in your keyword and instantly see what people are saying both in real-time and historically on any topic across all social networks. Discover influencers, find new and related topics, and gain valuable insights into the audiences that matter to you.

ThisMoment

ThisMoment helps businesses engaging with everyone everywhere. Depending on your business, ThisMoment’s Content Cloud helps you find, mix and share a variety of content through different channels across the Enterprise.

Trackur

Trackur provides simple, fast, and affordable social media monitoring and social analytics insights including trends, keyword discovery, automated sentiment analysis & influence scoring.

TrapIt

Trapit is a social selling, employee advocacy and content marketing tool. With one click of a button, your teams can share content with their prospects, social networks, and customers.

Tweepi

With Tweepi, you can follow a @user’s followers, follow a @user’s friends, follow using a Twitter list, and follow by copy/pasting a list.

Followadder

Followadder provides automated Instagram management software. It lets you get real Instagram followers, real photo likes and comments, schedule posts, follow/unfollow Instagram users, like back photos, automate photo likes and direct messaging, search by hashtag, create lists, and more.

Twellow

Twellow is like the Yellow Pages for Twitter. You can search many business categories, or your geographical area for Twitter followers.

TwentyFeet

TwentyFeet provides users with a powerful social reporting tool that can visualize your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts along with any other social service you use. Find out which of your tweets, posts, videos or photos get the most engagement in seconds.

TwitterFall

Twitterfall is based in the UK and lets users on Twitter view upcoming trends and patterns posted by other Twitter users.

Wajam

Wajam gives you search results of what your friends are sharing online above your normal search results.

Addict-o-matic

Addict-o-matic lets you instantly create a page that displays the latest buzz on any topic.

Bitly

Bitly lets you analyze social media engagement, optimize content, and measure how you’re spending your budget.

MyTopTweet

My Top Tweet shows your top 10 performing tweets.

SocialMention

SocialMention is a real-time social search and analysis platform.

Twazzup

Twazzup provides real-time analytics and monitoring for Twitter.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and social engagement on Twitter.

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We hope that you have found this information useful. To learn more about using the WP CMS platform to grow your business online, please see our related posts section below.

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The days of passively talking “at” your audience 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 highly connected global economy, you need to build, nurture and engage with a social community around your products, company, and brand and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest buzz around your services or products.

Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your products, brand, or company on social media, identify potential opportunities for engagement, spy on the competition, avert disasters, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, topics, products, 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, often carried out by a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, marketing professionals, online reputation specialists, agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately many technology companies have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about your brand allowing you to react to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.

WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform

WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it 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 using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Networks 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.

The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Run your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• User Groups
• Friendship Connections
• Discussion 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.

WPSymposium

(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)

WP Symposium 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 Messages
• Notifications
• User 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 business presence online 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 makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that allow users 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 automatically distribute content on various social media channels using WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Social measuring tools allow you to discover 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 your social network pages.

Additionally, there are many apps and tools that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many applications will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Business Brand And Online Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche

Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.

You are engaging with real people online, 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision 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, industry, or area of expertise, it can also take up a lot of your time.

An expertly configured WordPress site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog to automate content syndication across various social channels.)

Spy On Your Competition

Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you reverse engineer what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

Recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays 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 media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

“Go Viral” Faster

Most 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 are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands have failed.

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, engaging, entertaining or “spot-on”, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, go here or subscribe using the form below:

Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small

(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)

Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Tracking Online Trends

Managing Your Digital Reputation

You have probably heard about 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 high profile and even general 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.

If you or your image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative 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 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 and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Many companies all around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.

Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. 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 battle 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 enough 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 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 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. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Client Feedback Management

Monitoring Online Trends

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business 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 presentations 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 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. Implementing a regular schedule of posting topical 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 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 part two we explore WordPress resources and media tracking. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress Users – Part Two

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