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The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected digital economy, you need to build an engaged social community around your brand, company, and services and “listen”.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give you direct access to the latest buzz about your products or services.

Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and mind share, be alerted to crises, measure the impact of campaigns, and spot new market opportunities. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, brands, topics, or businesses.

As a tool for business intelligence, being able to track trends, activity, and conversations on social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include market researchers, digital reputation specialists, marketing teams, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.

Fortunately different service providers have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.

In the article below, 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 only a powerful, flexible and very easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.

To learn more about why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Understanding WordPress – The Small Business Owner’s Guide

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part 2 of 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 is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress

WordPress includes 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 article titles and descriptions for social networks.

The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium Pro

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

WPSymposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Mail
• Notifications
• User Directory
• Groups
• Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to posts and pages using shortcodes.

Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels

With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.

If you want to manage most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication on various social media channels using WordPress.

Market Research

Social media tools allow you to discover what your target audience wants, identify new opportunities and stay one step 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, there are many applications and tools that let you run surveys online. Many apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Business Credibility And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche

Building and strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.

You are trying to engage with real people, 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as the online community finds out about it.

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, but it can also be extremely time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress site can help establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven site to automatically distribute content on social channels.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing.

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 can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

Could Your Content Be The Next Online Viral “Hit”?

Most 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 dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large 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, 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 provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content. In this course we also discuss 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)

Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Online Trend Monitoring

Online Reputation Management

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 will tell 10 more people about it. People or competitors 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 work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that 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 do anything, 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/brand name and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Companies around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.

Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. 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” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

Are you effectively managing your digital reputation?

We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective user review management. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Reviews Management For WordPress

Tracking Online Trends

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, 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, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 (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 content with your 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 may end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Section One

In the next section we explore social media tracking resources that can help grow your business online. To read more, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Resources – Part 2

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