The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page on your site about your company and products is not enough. To succeed in today’s highly connected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your company, brand, and services.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest information about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, spot market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, and spy on the competition. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including market researchers, digital reputation management (ORM) agencies, marketing teams, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and sales teams. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track what is being said online about your products or brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and extremely easy to use content management 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 you achieve your online business goals, see this article: WordPress For Business Owners – An Online Guide To Growing A Business Using A WordPress Blog
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider 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, 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 article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
WordPress 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, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
This plugin allows you to run a social community on your website.
BuddyPress is known as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin has a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- 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 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 your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across various social channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social media measuring tools to listen to what your target audience wants, identify 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.
Also, many applications are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress website lets you automatically syndicate content across social media channels.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to observe and discover what experts and leaders in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 to explore new opportunities can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “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 succeeded virally 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 in your audience 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 Part Two 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 discuss many 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 Global Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard the term online reputation management. If you haven’t, you will be hearing 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 competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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 name and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 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, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective strategy to manage your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. For more details, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral 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 can provide 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 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 may 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 content that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement resources. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Resources – Part Two
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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