The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a web page with static information. To achieve success in today’s interconnected world, you need to grow, nurture and engage with a social community around your brand, products, and company, based around actively ”listening” to what they have to say.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, spot opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of campaigns, and avert crises. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social activity on social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include marketing professionals, market research, online reputation managers, agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately different service providers have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to track what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their products or brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Management Tools
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content management 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 why the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: The Business Owner’s Guide To Understanding WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into the 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 Products And Services To A Wider 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, 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 content for social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be 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 Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Online 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication on various social channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Using social media marketing tools allows you to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new business 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.
Additionally, there are apps that let you run surveys online. Many apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility Online And Showcase Your Talent
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment 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 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions 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 poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. 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.
(Automatically distribute content across various social channels with an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you reverse engineer what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral”?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands and corporations have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, 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 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. 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 information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands
(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
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 is being said 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. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now 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 defeating the negative effects with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 spot a negative comment or review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies are currently 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 well-known corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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” social media 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.
Do you have an effective strategy to manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage customer reviews. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 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 topical content with additional 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 website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part 2 we explore 30 social media resources for WordPress users. To continue reading, click on this link: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
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