The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your products, company, and brand.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest news around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, identify market opportunities, assess competitor activity and mind share, and help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, businesses, topics, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, social signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including marketing teams, digital reputation specialists, market researchers, professional sales reps, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many service providers have made available many affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your products or brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and extremely easy to use content management 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 WordPress is the vehicle that can help your business succeed online, go here: Using WordPress To Grow A Successful Small Business
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to tap into the full power social media marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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, YouTube 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 various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free plugin can be used to set up a social network on WordPress.
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 open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social 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 manage your social marketing strategy 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 users to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content across various social networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social tools and services to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step ahead of many 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 and tools are available that let you run surveys online. Many apps can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise
Strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a 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 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 to users online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as 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, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automatically distribute content on social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and discover what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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 grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative 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 are outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands and corporations 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 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 shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also explore ways to create content with 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 Large Businesses)
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 (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 if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage 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, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative effects with an excess of 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 a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations.
Monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How well are you managing your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. More information: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Benefiting From Online Trends
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 promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets 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 goes viral on YouTube, 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 (how many news media agencies 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 a “go to” destination or resource for your niche or industry. People could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social monitoring tools. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Resources For Tracking Social Activities – Part 2
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