The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a web page with static information. To achieve success in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to build and engage with a social community around your brand, services, and company and “listen”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you instant access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competition, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, measure the impact of campaigns, and spot new market opportunities. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, businesses, topics, or products.
As a tool for business intelligence, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by a cross-section of people including marketing professionals, market researchers, online reputation management (ORM) companies, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed many tools to facilitate the active tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your products or brand so you can respond to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that you may want to check out.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and very easy to use CMS 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 the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, 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 for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Social Media 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, 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 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 transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress can be used to run a social networking community on WordPress.
BuddyPress is known 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 open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Member 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
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that encourage users to share your content 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 distribute your web content across social media networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social measuring tools and applications to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step ahead of your competition.
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 tools that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many applications and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 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 situation or customer complaint poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you automatically distribute your web content across social media networks.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and even reverse engineer what experts and thought leaders in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever advertising 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 know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, compelling, entertaining 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 a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content. In this course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Global Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
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 is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. 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 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 diluting the negative with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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/brand name and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses everywhere are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have an digital reputation management strategy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective user review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Customer Reviews Management
Predicting Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting 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 publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on social media, 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 and new content ideas (how many news media agencies 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 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 post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore social media tracking tools for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Resources: Media Monitoring – 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