The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s connected global economy, you need to build, nurture and engage with a social community around your brand, company, and services and ”listen” to their feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest information around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or services on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, assess competitor activity, spot market opportunities, and help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, social media monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include marketing professionals, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, market research, professional sales reps, social engagement and community staff, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand or products so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and really easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: The Small Business Owner’s Guide To WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
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 Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social Media 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, 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 ideal for social media as a content marketing 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 WordPress plugin)
Set up an online social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
BuddyPress is known as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to drive most of 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 allow your site visitors to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your web content on various social media channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Social media tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new opportunities and stay 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.
Additionally, many applications and tools are available that let you run surveys online. Many applications and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Credibility And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 are born with 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 the online community finds out about it.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. 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 your web content syndication on various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and and perhaps 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 can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign 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 know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, informative or “spot-on”, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss 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 – 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
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard about online reputation management. 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses 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 diluting the negative impact with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 name and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively monitoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring conversations and interactions on social media extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 support the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage user reviews. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 get 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 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 (have you noticed how all news media agencies 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 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress social media measurement and resources. To continue reading, click on this link: WordPress Social Media Monitoring Resources – Part Two
***
"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)