The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged social community around your services, brand, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you direct access to the latest information around your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or services on social media, spy on your competition, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, avert crises, and spot potential market opportunities. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific businesses, products, brands, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track conversations and social activity on 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 marketing professionals, PR companies, market research, agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately different providers have made available affordable tools to facilitate the active tracking of a broad range of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, see this article: WordPress For Business – A Complete Guide To Growing Your Business With A WordPress Site
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress can be used to run a social network on your website, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, 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 platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro 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 Messaging
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools 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 run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many great plugins that allow users to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your web content on various social media networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social tools and services allow you to discover what your target audience wants, identify new business 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 networking sites.
Also, many apps are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many of these apps can be integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses 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 a credible authority in your niche, but it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute content on social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you observe and and perhaps also be inspired by what experts and leaders in your niche are doing right.
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. Connecting with others through social media channels can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Go Viral” Faster
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands 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, 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations 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 defeating the negative effects 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 a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies all around the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring conversations and posts on social media extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. For example, consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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 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” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you know what users are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. More info: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting 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 becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (have you noticed how all 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 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 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 social media measurement tools for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group