The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected digital world, you need to build an engaged community around your brand, company, and services and “listen”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest information about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, brand, or company on social media, spy on your competition, identify market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, and avert disasters. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, brands, businesses, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor social media channels like blogging, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Medium, etc., discussion groups, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include digital reputation managers, market researchers, marketing teams, professional sales reps, social engagement and community staff, and social marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed a range of tools to facilitate the monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and extremely 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 too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, go here: An Online Guide To Building A Successful Business With WordPress
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 to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown 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:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship 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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium provides 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
- 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 Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication on social media networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social tracking tools and applications allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay 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 those social networks.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Building your reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 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 horror stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as 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, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automatically syndicate your web content on social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and learn the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars 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 study and research your audience, 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore ways to create content that has 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard about 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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said 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 more people about it. People or competing companies could be posting negative things 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 services of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business 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.
Many businesses around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively managing their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of individuals. For example, consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 support the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Are you managing your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (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 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 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part two we explore social media tracking tools for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking : Resources – Part 2
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group