The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a web page with static information. To succeed in today’s interconnected global economy, you need to build a community around your company, products, and brand, based around actively ”listening” to their feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, spy on your competitors, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, spot potential opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of campaigns. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific topics, products, businesses, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social activity on social media channels like blogs, internet forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms, discussion boards, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, marketing professionals, digital reputation management (ORM) specialists, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and sales teams. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately many providers have developed tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using the WordPress platform 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 provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
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 WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own social networking community on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
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.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
Many social media platforms 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 drive your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 automate content syndication across various social networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Using social marketing tools allows you to listen to what your market wants, 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 your social networking sites.
Also, many apps are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building and strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust 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 to gain 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror 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.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you automatically syndicate your content across social networks.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you discover and even 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.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies research 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” Online?
Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 the next section of this article could 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 meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about 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 said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before 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 competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if this goes 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 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 diluting the negative effects with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you from spreading further, 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 find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies all over the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring conversations and interactions on social media extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security-related departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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, 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 later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage user feedback. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy User Feedback Management
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what 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 announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many 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 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 other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part two we explore 30 social media tools that can help grow your business online. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
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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)