The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a web page with static information. To achieve success in today’s connected global economy, you need to build and nurture a social community around your brand, services, and company and ”listen” to their feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest information around your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, identify opportunities for engagement, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, businesses, topics, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social media channels like blogs, internet forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, etc., 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 people including market researchers, marketing teams, online reputation managers, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and social marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track what is being said online about your products or brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Management Tools
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content publishing 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 a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: Everything You Need To Know To Grow A Successful Business Online With A WordPress Blog
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.
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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal 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
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- 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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who need 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 Many Social 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 manage most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 your web content syndication across various social channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Social media monitoring tools and applications allow you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and 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.
Also, there are tools that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Building your reputation and brand, 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 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 online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community finds out about it.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress blog to automatically distribute your content on social media networks.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to discover and and perhaps even be inspired by what the experts are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 to explore new opportunities can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content Be The Next Online Viral Sensation?
Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success 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 in your audience will find so useful, engaging, entertaining or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in the next section 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 will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore ways to create content with 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 – Not Just For Big Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 others are saying 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 businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if left 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 defeating 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 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 your name or your business/brand name 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 website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses all around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the reputation of average individuals. Consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
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 later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective online reputation management strategy in place?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Reviews Management For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
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 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 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 (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 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 could 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 content that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore best social media monitoring tools for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: 29 Social Media Tracking Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
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