The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page about your company and services is not enough. To succeed in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to build and nurture a social community around your products, company, and brand and “listen”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, identify market opportunities, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific brands, topics, businesses, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social signal monitoring 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 people including online reputation specialists, market research, marketing professionals, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of providers have made available a range of tools that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to react to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and very easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that allow users to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content on social networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Using social media measuring tools and applications allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay one step 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 your social pages.
Also, many applications are available that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many apps and tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility Online And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automate content syndication on social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and and perhaps also be inspired by what the experts are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands and corporations have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, entertaining or even funny, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also explore 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 Large Brands)
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 the term 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 others are saying about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. 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. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that 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 reducing the negative impact with positive material, 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 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 your name or your business/brand name and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many businesses all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of individuals is also very important. Consider these situations:
- 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 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.
Are you effectively managing your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Predicting Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, 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 Facebook, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (have you noticed how all news media broadcasters 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 an authoritative 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 information that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore social media measurement resources for WordPress users. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: WordPress And Social Media Measurement – Part 2
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