Blog

The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your services, brand, and company.

Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news about your services or products.

Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your products, company, or brand on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, assess competitor activity, avert disasters, and spot market opportunities. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.

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 various people including market researchers, marketing professionals, digital reputation management (ORM) specialists, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately various providers have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling you to track consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely fashion.

In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.

WordPress And Social Media Marketing

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

To learn more about using the WP software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.

Promote Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Social Media With WordPress

WordPress comes with 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.

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

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium Pro

(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messages
• Notification Bar
• Directory
• Groups
• 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

Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.

If you want to run your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on various social media networks using WordPress.

Market Research

Social tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and 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.

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

Build Your Brand And Online Reputation And Showcase Your Talent

Building your business reputation and brand online, 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 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 comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.

Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also be very demanding on your time.

An expertly configured WordPress-driven site 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 more visitors to your business.

(You can automate content syndication on social channels using an expertly configured WordPress website.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.

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

It’s no secret that recruitment companies research social media 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 to explore new opportunities can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

“Going Viral” Online Faster

Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget and well-funded campaigns 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, entertaining 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free 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 Big Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Monitoring Online Trends

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). 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 it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

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

If you or your brand’s image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative impact with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business 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 person directly, etc.

Many companies are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of individuals. For example, consider the scenarios below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, 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 WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Customer Feedback Management

Predicting Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, 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, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 (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 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Section One

In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful tools for measuring social performance. To keep reading this article, click on this link: WordPress Resources: Social Media Tracking – Part 2

***