The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected global and digital world, you need to grow and nurture an engaged community around your services, company, and brand and “listen”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, assess competitor activity and market share, spot market opportunities, and take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, products, brands, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, social media 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 market research, marketing professionals, online reputation management (ORM) companies, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately many service providers have developed a range of tools that facilitate the active tracking of a broad range of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their products or brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that are worth knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section 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 is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social Media 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform 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 WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress 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
- Discussion 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 has an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides a strong support community and assistance for members who need 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 Many 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 manage 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 allow users to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content across various social networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social tracking tools and services to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new opportunities and stay 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 many applications and tools that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many of these applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Credibility And Brand
Building and strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 to users online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress website to automate content syndication across various social channels.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you reverse engineer what the experts are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large and well-funded campaigns have failed.
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, engaging, informative or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this 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 Big Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard about 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 many individuals and brands to track what others are saying about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative effects with an excess of positive material, 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 your name or your business/brand name and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies all over the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- 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 your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what people are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective customer review management. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management For WordPress
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact 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 (have you noticed how all 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 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 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 site or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part two we explore WordPress and social media and useful social tracking resources. To read more, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Tools For Monitoring Social Indicators – Part 2
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