The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page about your business and services is not enough. To achieve business success in today’s connected world, you need to grow and nurture a community around your brand, services, and company, based around ”listening” to their feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest information about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and market dominance, avert crises, identify potential opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, brands, products, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to track online conversations and social activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, social networking sites, micro-blogging platforms, discussion boards, video/photo sharing websites, and user-generated content 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 marketing professionals, digital reputation management (ORM) agencies, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed affordable tools to facilitate the active tracking of a broad range of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management 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.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Learn How To Grow Your Small Business With A WordPress Blog
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to explore the new social business 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.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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 content for social networkign sites.
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 network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium 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 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many 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 and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
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 has a number of plugins that allow users to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your content across social media networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social media monitoring tools to listen to what consumers want, 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 network pages.
Additionally, many apps and tools are available that let you survey customers online. Many apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a robust 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 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 and how you respond online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision 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 an 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 site lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automate content syndication across social networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and discover what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays 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 new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” 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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations 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, engaging, entertaining 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 a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also explore ways to create content with 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard of 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 negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard the saying 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 competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative with an excess of 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 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Businesses are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 help your case.
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 about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Online reputation management is becoming more important in the online economy.
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. More information: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Analyzing Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, 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, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 and new content ideas (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. 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore media tracking tools for WordPress users. To continue reading, click on this link: Media Monitoring Tools Every WordPress User Should Know About – Part Two
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