The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s connected world, you need to build a social community around your company, services, and brand, all based around “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, assess competitor activity, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, identify new opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor activity, trends, and conversations on social media channels like blogs, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Medium, etc., discussion groups, 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, typically carried out by various people including marketing teams, market research, online reputation management (ORM) specialists, professional sales reps, social media marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and very easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your business grow and succeed online, go here: Using A WordPress Site To Grow A Successful Small Business
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in 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 makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks 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 article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Run an online social network on your site.
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 platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Member 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content 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 automate web content syndication across social media channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Social media tools and applications allow you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify new opportunities and stay ahead of many 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 your social network pages.
Also, there are applications that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise
Strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, 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 paying a heavy price when the online community finds out about it.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven site to automate content syndication across various social networks.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and discover the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Web Content Be The Next Online Viral Sensation?
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 dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful 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 details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Digital 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 others are saying 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 tell 10 more 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 do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 diluting the negative impact with an excess of 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of individuals is also important. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- 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 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” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective online reputation management strategy in place?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective customer review management. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Analyzing Online Trends
Regardless of which 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 promoted, 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 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 (how many news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 content that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress social media measurement tools. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Resources For Social Media Tracking – Part Two
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