The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page about your business is no longer enough. To achieve success in today’s interconnected world, you need to build an engaged social community around your brand, company, and services, based around actively ”listening” to their feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and market share, identify market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, and help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by embittered customers. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.
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 groups that include marketing teams, PR agencies, market research, sales teams, social media marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the active tracking of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to track consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and extremely easy to use content publishing 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.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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 business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right Audience 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who need 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 social features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media tools 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 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 makes available a number of plugins that encourage users to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content across various social networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social measuring tools to listen to what consumers want, identify 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 your social networking sites.
Additionally, there are applications that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many of these applications and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community gets hold of the news.
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, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website can help establish your your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you automatically distribute content on social media channels.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations can help you observe and discover what authorities and influencers 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 to explore new opportunities can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
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 dollars at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, compelling, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content. In this course we also discuss ways to create content that has 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 activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 will tell 10 other 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 seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, 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 reducing the negative effects 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 spot 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business/brand and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not effectively managing their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of individuals. 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 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 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 the situation in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release 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 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 (have you noticed how all news sites 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 a “go to” 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 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 Section One
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful social tracking resources. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Monitoring Tools – Part 2
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