The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page on your site about your company is no longer enough. To achieve success in today’s connected digital world, you need to build and engage with a social community around your company, brand, and services, based around “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, brand, or company on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, be alerted to disasters, spy on your competitors, and spot potential market opportunities. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social media monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include market researchers, PR staff, marketing teams, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately different providers have created a range of tools that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business,etc.
What Makes 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, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, see this article: The Small Business Owner’s Guide To Using WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social marketing opportunities.
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 A Wider Audience 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run 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:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to drive 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 makes available a number of great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication across social media networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tools and services to listen to what your target audience wants, identify trends and new opportunities and stay ahead of 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.
Additionally, many applications and tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations to gain valuable insights.
Remember, we have been given 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 other user’s comments and discussions 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 suffering heavy losses as soon as 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 website helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automatically distribute content on social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and discover what the experts are doing.
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 can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most 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 dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands have failed.
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 could 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 meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content with 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 Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now 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 defeating the negative with 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 yourself or your business 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 all around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not effectively monitoring their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 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 a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Online reputation management is an important aspect of doing business online.
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Management Of Customer Feedback
Monitoring Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get 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 Twitter, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (how many news media broadcasters 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 additional 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 online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part two we explore WordPress and social media and useful social monitoring resources. To read the rest of this article, click here: 29 Social Media Measurement Resources For WordPress – Part 2
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