The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s connected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your company, brand, and products.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest news about your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, services, or company on social media, avert impending crises, spy on the competition, identify market opportunities, and measure the impact of campaigns. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, social media signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including marketing teams, PR staff, market research, social media marketing agencies, sales teams, 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 providers have made available a range of tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify what is being said online about your products or brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible 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 please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch 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 images 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 ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress allows you to run your own social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
BuddyPress is known 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.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need 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 features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many 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 most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that encourage users to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across social channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social tracking tools to listen to what your target audience wants, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay 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 those social networks.
Additionally, many applications are available that let you run surveys online. Many applications and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automate your web content syndication across various social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media allows you to reverse engineer what experts in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Online Viral “Hit”?
Most 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 money at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget 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 in your audience will find so useful, engaging, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content. In this free course we also explore ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands
(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
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management. If you haven’t, you will be hearing 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative effects with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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/brand name and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. 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, you can still create an easy “set and forget” 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.
How are you managing your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective customer 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 your business in, there are always new things happening. New apps 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 information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral 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 can provide 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 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 website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore great media monitoring resources for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: Essential Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress Users – Part 2
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