The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected global and digital economy, you need to build and nurture an engaged community around your products, brand, and company and ”listen” to what they have to say.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest information around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and market dominance, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, identify potential opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, businesses, brands, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor social media 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 online reputation management (ORM) companies, market research, marketing professionals, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what is being said online about their products or brands so they can react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and really easy to use content publishing 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 please see our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, 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 to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Media 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Run your own social community on your website.
BuddyPress is known 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 application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium 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 Mail
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing strategy 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 users to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 automatically syndicate content across various social channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Use social tools and services to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay one step 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 accounts.
Additionally, many applications and tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many applications can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility Online
Strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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 to users online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community gets hold of the news.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you automate web content syndication across social channels.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to discover and and maybe also reverse engineer what the experts are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time researching social media and studying the 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”?
Many 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 advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands and corporations have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, 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 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 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard about online reputation management (ORM). 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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they 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 seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 reducing the negative impact with an excess of 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 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 address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. Consider the situations below:
- 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 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, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Online reputation management should not be ignored if you want your business to grow in the web economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective user review management. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new 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 release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (have you noticed how all 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 topical 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 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part two we explore media resources that can help grow your business online. To read the rest of this article, click here: 25+ Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now