The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s interconnected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a social community around your brand, company, and products.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give you direct access to the latest information around your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on your competitors, and avert disasters. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to track social activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, message boards, video/photo sharing websites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 teams, market researchers, PR agencies, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and sales teams. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various providers have made available tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their products or brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media
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 the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your small business grow online, see this article: The Complete Guide To Growing Your Successful Business Using A WordPress Blog
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article, 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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 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 great for social media as a content publishing and 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 site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free plugin helps you set up and manage your own social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require 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 your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many 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 run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that encourage users to share your content online 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 automatically distribute your content across various social channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social media tools and services allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and 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 your social network pages.
Additionally, there are apps that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand
Building your business reputation and brand online, 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 genuine and meaningful. 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 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 or customer complaint very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you automate web content syndication on social networks.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Using social media to explore new opportunities can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. 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 info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital Reputation
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 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 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff 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 companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative impact with an excess of 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/brand 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 are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they ignore their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of individuals. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Managing online reputation is an important aspect of doing business online.
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective customer review management. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Analyzing Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 a “go to” destination or resource for your niche or industry. People may 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 WordPress and social media monitoring. To continue reading this article, click on this link: Top Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress – Part Two
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