The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a social community around your products, company, and brand.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest news around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spot market opportunities, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by online users, and assess competitor activity and market share. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, businesses, brands, or topics.
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, often carried out by a cross-section of people including marketing professionals, PR agencies, market research, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the active tracking of a broad range of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what is being said online about their products or brands so they can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Media Tracking Tools & Applications
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management 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 why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your business grow online, see this article: Using WordPress To Grow Your Small Business
Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with built-in social features, like interactive 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal 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
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Run an online social networking community on WordPress.
BuddyPress is known as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin has an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating content is very easy. There are tools 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 a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to drive most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that encourage your site visitors to 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 various social media networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Using social tools and services allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business 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 accounts.
Additionally, there are many applications and tools that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Reputation And Brand
Building your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic 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. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as the online community finds out about it.
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 extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress website lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate content on social media using an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you observe and discover what experts in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content Be The Next Online Viral “Hit”?
Many 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 you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large 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, engaging, entertaining or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in the next section of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content. In this free 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 Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 others are saying about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now 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 diminishing the negative with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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 a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of individuals. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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 enough good, positive things published online either to help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Online reputation management should not be ignored if you want your business to grow.
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage user feedback. More information: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Monitoring Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate 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 release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news media outlets now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 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 1
In part two we explore WordPress social media measurement tools. To read more, click on this link: WordPress And Social Media Tracking – 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)