The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a page on your site with static information about your business is no longer enough. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your company, brand, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, identify new opportunities for engagement, avert impending crises, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.
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 a cross-section of groups that include digital reputation management (ORM) companies, market researchers, marketing professionals, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and sales teams. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your products or brand allowing you to react to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Monitoring Tools
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit 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 explore the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers 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, 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 content for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Run a social networking community on WordPress.
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 open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium 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 Messaging
- Notifications
- 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 Many Social Channels
Many social media platforms 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 your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your web content on various social networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Using social media tools and applications allows you to listen to what your market wants, identify trends and new 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 networking sites.
Additionally, there are many apps that let you run surveys online. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility And Showcase Your Talent
Building your reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a solid 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 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 stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate your content on social networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and discover the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.
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. Using social media to explore new opportunities can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral “Hit”?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands and corporations have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show 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. For more information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term 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 is being said about them online – especially if what is being posted 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. People or competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, 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 diluting the negative with positive material, 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 name and spot a negative comment or review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they ignore their online reputations.
Actively monitoring conversations and interactions on social media extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. Consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
How well do you manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business through effective user review management. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets 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 goes viral 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 (how many news sites 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 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 site or brand 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 part two we explore WordPress social media monitoring and resources. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress – Part 2
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group