The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected digital world, you need to build a community around your services, brand, and company, based around actively “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest information about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, services, or brand on social media, spy on your competition, be alerted to impending crises, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spot opportunities for engagement. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, brands, topics, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor conversations, activity, and trends on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, discussion groups, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content 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 groups that include market research, digital reputation management (ORM) agencies, marketing professionals, sales teams, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed a range of tools to facilitate the active tracking of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to track consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing 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 this article, you will be able to explore the full power of social media.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for 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 transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is known as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require 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 Multiple Social Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content across social channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social tools and services to listen to what your market wants, identify trends and new 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 your social networking sites.
Also, many applications are available that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these apps and tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community gets hold of the news.
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 be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress website lets you automatically syndicate content across various social channels.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer what experts and leaders in your niche 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 channels can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Many 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 you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands have failed.
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, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content. In this course we also explore ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
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 many 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 it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative impact with positive content, 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 can help you. If you Google yourself 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 everywhere are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring conversations and posts on social media extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also very important. Consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Managing your digital reputation should not be avoided if you want your business to grow in the web economy.
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, 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, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 (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 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 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 information that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore best social media measurement tools for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Resources – Part 2
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