The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s interconnected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your products, brand, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your products, brand, or company on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, identify potential market opportunities, be alerted to crises, and assess competitor activity and market share. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, products, topics, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, social signal monitoring 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 online reputation specialists, marketing professionals, market research, sales teams, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed many tools to facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify what consumers are saying about your brand or products allowing you to react to conversations and engage 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 just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage 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 using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social 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, Pinterest 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.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using 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 a social community on your site.
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 an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- User 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.
Syndicate 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 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 has many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content on various social channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social tools allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step 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 your social accounts.
Also, there are many apps that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many applications and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 online 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 being the subject of much scorn and derision when 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 site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automate content syndication on various social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and discover what experts in your niche 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 and joint ventures can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
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 money at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations have failed dismally.
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 even funny, 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 will show you how to create meaningful and compelling 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. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online 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 will tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now 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 defeating the negative with positive material, 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 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Businesses around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they ignore their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of individuals. For example, consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 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 good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective customer review management. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing User Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 (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. 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore social media measurement resources for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Monitoring Resources – Part 2
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