The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your brand, company, and services.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give you instant access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, spy on your competition, avert crises, spot market opportunities, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, products, topics, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor social media channels like blogging, forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, discussion 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, often carried out by various people including online reputation management (ORM) companies, market researchers, marketing professionals, social marketing agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the active monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to identify what is being said online about your brand or products so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools 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 only a powerful, flexible and extremely easy to use content management 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 why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, go here: Using A WordPress Blog To Grow A Successful Business
Using some of the tools listed here 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Run your own online social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share 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 business presence online and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to drive 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 allow your site visitors to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 automate web content syndication on various social media channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social tracking tools to discover what your target audience wants, identify trends and new 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 those social networks.
Additionally, many applications are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many applications and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent
Building your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on 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 and how you respond to users online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automate your web content syndication across various social networks using an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you observe and and perhaps also be inspired by the success strategies of experts and influencers 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 name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users 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 the next section of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content. 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 – 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
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing 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 if what is being posted is negative. 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things 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, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative impact with positive content, 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 your name or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-related departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 enough good, positive things published online either to support 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 anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
How well do you manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective 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 info: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Monitoring Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (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 topical content with your 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part two we explore media resources for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Tracking Tools That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part 2
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)