The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected global economy, you need to build a community around your products, company, and brand, all based around ”listening” to their needs and feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest news around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, spy on your competition, identify new opportunities for engagement, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to track social media channels like blogs, forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, etc., message boards, video/photo sharing websites, and user-generated content is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including online reputation managers, market research, marketing teams, agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed affordable tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your products or brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and extremely 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 why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your small business grow online, see this article: The Small Business Owner’s Guide To Understanding WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Media 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(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 Messages
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate 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 run your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that allow users to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your content on social networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Using social media measuring tools and applications allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new opportunities and stay one step 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.
Also, there are applications that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Online Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, 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 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 situation or customer complaint poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog to automatically syndicate content across social media.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to discover and and perhaps even be inspired by 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 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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands and corporations have failed dismally.
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 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 meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also explore ways to create content with 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 – Not Just For Large Brands
(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 of online reputation management (ORM). 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that 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 weakening the negative with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses all over the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they ignore their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have a system in place to manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective customer review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Customer Reviews Management
Predicting Online Trends
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 information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (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. Implementing a regular schedule of posting topical content with additional 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 information that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore media tools for WordPress users. To continue reading, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking : Tools – Part 2
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"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