The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a page on your website with static information about your company is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s highly connected global and digital world, you need to build and nurture an engaged community around your company, products, and brand and “listen”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give you direct access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, spy on the competition, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, and spot opportunities for engagement. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, products, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track social media 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 research, marketing teams, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed affordable tools to facilitate the active tracking of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your products or brand allowing you to respond to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and extremely 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.
To learn more about why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: WordPress And Small Business – The Beginner’s Guide To Growing Your Successful Business Using A WordPress Site
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 for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, 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 publishing and 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 site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Use BuddyPress to set up and run your own social network on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium offers 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
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating your content has never been easier. There are 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 time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication across various social networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social measuring tools allows you to listen to what your market wants, identify new business opportunities and stay one step 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 those social networks.
Also, there are applications that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. 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 to users online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
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 take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automate your web content syndication on various social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer what the experts are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Go Viral” Faster
Many 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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a 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 study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, informative or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content. In this course we also discuss many 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard the saying 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 companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses 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 reducing the negative effects with an excess of positive content, 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 yourself or your business and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses everywhere are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are still ignoring their online reputations.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. There’s also the online reputation of average individuals. 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 enough 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 any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you know what customers are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. See this page to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, 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, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 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. 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 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 site 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 Section 1
In the next section we explore dozens of media resources for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Tools – Part 2
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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