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The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a web page with static information. To achieve success in today’s connected digital economy, you need to grow and nurture a community around your brand, products, and company and ”listen” to their feedback.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest buzz about your services or products.

Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, services, or company on social media, identify new opportunities for engagement, spy on your competitors, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, products, brands, or topics.

As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor activity, trends, and social conversations on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, social networking sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., discussion boards, video/photo sharing websites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including online reputation specialists, market research, marketing teams, sales teams, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately different technology companies have developed tools that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can react to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.

In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.

Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?

WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and really 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 application for growing your online presence in the social realm.

For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, see this article: WordPress And Small Business – The Beginner’s Guide To Growing A Small Business Using A WordPress Site

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social 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.

Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks 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, YouTube and many others.

For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, 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 ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social networking, using 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:

• Extended Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• Extensible User Groups
• Friendship Connections
• Online 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 an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium Pro

(WPSymposium WordPress social network 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
• Notification Bar
• User Directory
• Groups
• Online Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels

With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating your 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 marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.

If you want to drive your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content on social media channels using WordPress.

Market Research

Using social tools allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and 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 pages.

Also, there are many applications and tools that let you survey customers online. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.

Build And Strengthen Your Business Reputation And Brand Online

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

You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations for 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 online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets exposed online.

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

An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.

(An expertly configured WordPress site lets you automatically distribute your web content across various social channels.)

Study Authority Sites In Your Niche

Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you observe and and perhaps also be inspired by the success strategies of authorities and influencers in your niche.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

Could Your Web Content “Go Viral”?

Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.

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, 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:

Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global 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)
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management

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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.

If you or your brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative impact with 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business/brand name and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Businesses everywhere are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.

Monitoring online conversations extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider these situations:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 support your job application.

Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.

How good is your reputation online?

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

Analyzing Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 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 and becomes relevant again, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news media broadcasters now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical 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 a “go to” 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 information that other people will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part 1

In part 2 we explore more than 27 social media measurement resources for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: 30 Social Media Measurement Resources For WordPress Users – Part Two

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