The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected global economy, you need to build and nurture a social community around your products, brand, and company, based around ”listening” to their needs and feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest information around your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your products, brand, or company on social media, be alerted to impending crises, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on your competition, and identify market opportunities. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, topics, businesses, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by a cross-section of people including market research, marketing teams, digital reputation management companies, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed many affordable tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to respond to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible 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 the benefits of using the WordPress web site management software please see other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to tap into the 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 Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress comes with built-in social features, like interactive 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 networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Run your own online social community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require 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 your posts and pages 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 drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that allow users to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content on social channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social tools and services to listen to 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.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you run surveys online. Many of these applications and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Reputation
Strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear 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 can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress blog can automate web content syndication across various social media channels.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to discover and and perhaps even reverse engineer what the experts are doing right.
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 media can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a campaign 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 Part Two of this article can 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. 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 activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, 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 defeating the negative impact with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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 yourself or your business and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively monitoring their online reputations.
Monitoring conversations and new posts on social media extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security departments. There’s also the online reputation of individuals. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you know what people are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business, products or services through effective user review management. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management For WordPress
Analyzing Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you are 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 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (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 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 post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress social media tracking and resources. To read more, click on this link: Social Media Tracking Resources For Business Owners – Part Two
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