The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve success in today’s highly connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your brand, services, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and market dominance, identify market opportunities, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, topics, products, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor social activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., message boards, video 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 various groups that include PR staff, marketing professionals, market research, agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
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 campaigns.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into the full power of marketing your business on social media.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress includes 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is often referred to 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 plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Online 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your content on social channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social tracking tools and applications allow you to discover what your audience wants, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay one step ahead of 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, many applications are available that let you survey customers online. Many of these applications and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Brand And Credibility
Strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision 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 an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automatically syndicate your content across various social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral “Hit”?
Most 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 are out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands have failed.
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, engaging, entertaining 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content. In this course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Big Businesses
(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
Managing Your Digital 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said 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 tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, 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 your name or your business/brand name and spot a negative comment or review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many businesses are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of average individuals is also important. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective system for managing your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective user review management. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
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 announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (how many news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 site or business 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 Part One
In the next section we explore 25+ social media tracking resources for WordPress users. To read the rest of this article, click here: Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
***
"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now