The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to put up a web page with static information. To achieve success in today’s connected global economy, you need to build a social community around your company, products, and brand and ”listen” to their feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you direct access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, products, or company on social media, avert impending crises, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, identify opportunities for engagement, and assess competitor activity and market share. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track social media channels like blogs, forums, social networking sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., discussion groups, video sites, and user-generated content 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 digital reputation specialists, marketing professionals, market researchers, professional sales reps, social engagement and community personnel, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to track consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to react to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
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.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your business grow online, see this article: The Business Owner’s Guide To Using WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, you will be able to explore the full power of marketing your business on social media.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right 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, 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 social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up 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:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online 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 Multiple Social Channels
Many social media platforms 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 drive most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow users to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, 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 automatically syndicate your web content across various social media channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Social tools and applications allow you to discover what consumers want, identify new 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 and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Brand And Credibility
Building your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
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, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress blog to automatically syndicate content on social channels.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and learn what experts in your niche are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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. Using social media to explore new opportunities can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “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 or cute 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 in your audience will find so useful, engaging, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling 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. For more details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard about 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. 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 businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations 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 diluting the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you from spreading further, 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 find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies all over the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they are not effectively monitoring their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security-related departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support the things you have listed in 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 anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Are you ignoring your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new 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, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral 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 sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 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 post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore social media tracking resources for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Resources For Social Media Tracking – Part Two
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum