Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or products on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, be alerted to disasters, spot market opportunities, and spy on your competitors. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., discussion boards, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 PR staff, market researchers, marketing professionals, social media marketing agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed affordable tools that facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what is being said online about their brands or products allowing them to respond to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Media Monitoring Tools & Applications
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage 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 the vehicle that can help your business succeed online, go here: WordPress For Business – An Online Guide To Growing Your Successful Small Business Using A WordPress Blog
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social business 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 Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require 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 social features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence 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 lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your content on various social media networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social media tools and applications allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay ahead of your competition.
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.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Building your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven website can automate your web content syndication across social networks.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and learn the success strategies of experts and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies research social media 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 brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget and well-funded campaigns 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, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content. In this course we also explore many ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online 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 is being said 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 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 this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 positive content, 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 spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-related agencies. The ability to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also very important. For example, consider the situations 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have a system in place to manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. See this page to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, 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 (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 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part 2 we explore more than 27 social media monitoring resources for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: Media Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum