The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected global economy, you need to grow, nurture and engage with a social community around your company, products, and brand and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest information about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, identify potential market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, and spy on your competition. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific topics, products, businesses, or brands.
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, typically carried out by various groups that include online reputation specialists, market researchers, marketing teams, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different providers have created tools to facilitate the tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to react to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: Using WordPress To Grow Your Business Online
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of 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 provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Media Networks 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various 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 WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress can be used to set up and manage your own social network 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.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online 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 Many Social Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to drive most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication on social media channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Use social media tools and applications to listen to what your market wants, identify new trends and 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 those social networks.
Also, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility Online And Showcase Your Talent
Building your business reputation and brand, 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 genuine and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog to automate your web content syndication across social networks.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and discover what experts and thought leaders in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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 grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands 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 even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two 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 will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also explore 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 – 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
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 diluting the negative effects 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 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 spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are still ignoring their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. 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 support the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective customer review management. To learn more, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Customer Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, 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, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 channels now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 information that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore great social media tools for business owners. To continue reading, click here: Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress – Part Two
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