The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your company, products, and brand.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on your competitors, be alerted to disasters, and identify opportunities for engagement. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including PR companies, market research, marketing teams, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many technology companies have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand or products so you can respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content publishing 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.
For an overview of why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: The Complete Guide To Growing A Business With WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, 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 is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider 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, YouTube 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 networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up an online social networking community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, 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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium provides 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
- 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating your content has never been easier. 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 considerable time and money.
If you want to drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow users to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out 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 channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Using social media measuring tools allows you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify trends and new opportunities and stay one step 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 network pages.
Additionally, there are applications and tools that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many applications can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust 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 for 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 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 as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
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, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress site can automate your content syndication across social media networks.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities and influencers 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 to explore new opportunities can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, informative 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 useful and engaging content. In this free course we also explore ways to create content that has 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 – Not Just For Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term 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 others are saying about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things 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 work of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s 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 positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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 your name or your business and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies everywhere are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are still ignoring their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute feels 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 an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective user review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing User Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 (have you noticed how all news media outlets 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 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore social media measurement tools for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: Media Monitoring Tools For Business Owners – Part 2
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group