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 success in today’s interconnected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your company, brand, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you instant access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
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 embittered customers, spot opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, topics, products, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, 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 groups that include digital reputation specialists, marketing professionals, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many technology companies have developed affordable tools that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and very easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it 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 the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your small business grow and succeed online, see this article: An Online Guide To Growing A Business With WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
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 includes 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to run most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 automate web content syndication on various social media networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Social measuring tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and opportunities and stay 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 networking sites.
Additionally, many applications are available that let you survey customers online. Many applications will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand
Building and strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations to gain 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 to users online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision 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 an authority in your niche, but it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress blog to automate your web content syndication across social media.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to observe and even reverse engineer the success strategies of experts and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral Sensation?
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a marketing 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 study and research your audience, and provide content that users in your audience 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss ways to create content that has 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 Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term 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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. 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. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses 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 weakening the negative impact with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many businesses are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of individuals. For example, consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you have a strategy to manage your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Management Of User Feedback
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 (how many news sites 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 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 information that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful tools for tracking social metrics. To read more, click here: WordPress And Social Media Measurement – Part Two
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now