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The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a web page with static information. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your services, company, and brand.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you direct access to the latest news around your services or products.

Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, assess competitor activity, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by online users, identify potential opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific topics, businesses, products, or brands.

As a tool for business intelligence, social 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 people including market researchers, marketing professionals, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, sales teams, social engagement and community staff, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately different service providers have made available affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the tracking of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand or products so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.

In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.

WordPress And Social Media

WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content publishing 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 the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the 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.

Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right 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, YouTube 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.

WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be 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 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:

• 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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium

(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)

WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messages
• Notifications
• User Directory
• Groups
• 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.

Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels

With most social media tools, syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools and services 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 run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that allow users to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 distribute content across various social media channels using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Using social media measuring tools and applications allows you to listen to what consumers want, 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 those social networks.

Additionally, there are many apps that let you survey customers online. Many applications will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Reputation And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent

Strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.

You are trying to engage 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 to comments and discussions online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets circulated online.

Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be very time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.

(An expertly configured WordPress-driven website can automatically syndicate your web content across social media.)

Spy On Authorities In Your Niche

Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.

Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

It’s no secret that 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 can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

“Going Viral” Online Faster

Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing 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 big-budget brands have failed.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free 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 – 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)
• Online Trend Monitoring

Online Reputation Management

You have probably heard of 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 will tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if things go 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 businesses 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 positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you from spreading further, 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 your name or your business/brand and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Businesses are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. There’s also the reputation of individuals. For example, consider the scenarios below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 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 a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

How good is your reputation online?

We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage user feedback. More information: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what 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 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 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news media outlets 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 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 website or business 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 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful tools for monitoring social indicators. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Tools For Tracking Social Activities – Part Two

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