Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news around your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, spot market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, avert impending crises, and spy on your competition. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, 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 groups that include market research, marketing professionals, PR staff, sales teams, social engagement and community staff, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a wide range of social media channels, allowing companies to track consumer behavior around their brands or products so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content management 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 WordPress for a business website or blog 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 Services And Products 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own social networking community on your site, 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 an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple 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 run most of 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 encourage your site visitors to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication on social networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Using social marketing tools and applications allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay 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 network pages.
Additionally, there are apps and tools that let you survey customers online. Many applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Building your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 and how you respond online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automate your content syndication on social networks with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to reverse engineer what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.
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, compelling, informative 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 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 compelling content. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content that has 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 Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard about online reputation management. 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 is being said about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 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 address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 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 a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective online reputation management strategy in place?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which 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, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 (how many news media outlets 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 a “go to” 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 content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore WordPress social media tracking and resources. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Tracking Resources 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)