The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected global and digital economy, you need to grow and nurture a social community around your company, products, and brand, all based around “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you instant access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spot market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, assess competitor activity and market dominance, and be alerted to crises. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, products, businesses, 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 market researchers, digital reputation management (ORM) specialists, marketing teams, agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately different service providers have developed a range of tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your products or brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage CMS 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.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see 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 tap into the new social business 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.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media 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, 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 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
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Run your own online social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.
BuddyPress is known 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 plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium offers 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to drive most of your social marketing 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 web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication on social media networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social media tools and applications allows you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify new business 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 those social networks.
Also, there are many apps that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many apps will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Building your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a 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 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 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 as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress blog to automatically syndicate content on various social channels.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and learn what experts and thought leaders in your niche are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays 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. Connecting with others through social channels can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Web Content Be The Next Viral “Hit”?
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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands have failed to take off.
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 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss many 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 Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard about 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 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. People or competing businesses 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 work of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your 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 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many businesses are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring conversations and new posts on social media extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. Consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 help your case.
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, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Managing digital reputation should not be ignored if you want your business to grow in the digital economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy User Reviews Management
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on social media, 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 (have you noticed how all news media channels now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore 30 media tracking tools every WordPress user should know about. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Tools For WordPress Users – 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