The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static web page about your company is no longer enough. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your company, brand, and services.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give you direct access to the latest news about your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, measure the impact of campaigns, assess competitor activity and market share, and identify opportunities for engagement. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, businesses, topics, or brands.
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, typically carried out by various people including marketing professionals, PR companies, market researchers, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different service providers have developed tools to facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your products or brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
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, 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 your small business grow and succeed online, see this article: The Beginner’s Guide To Building A Successful Business Using WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
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 Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes 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 social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up your own online social network on WordPress.
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.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to drive most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that allow users to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content across social channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Social media tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay ahead of many 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 customer-driven sales campaigns. Many tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Building your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, 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 online and how you respond to 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 poorly and end up paying a heavy price when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you automatically distribute your web content across social channels.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media allows you to discover and even be inspired by the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies research social media 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 channels can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral Sensation?
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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands and corporations have failed dismally.
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, entertaining or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. 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 information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about 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 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 will tell 10 other people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things 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 companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses 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 diminishing the negative impact with 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 yourself or your business 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 everywhere are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not effectively managing their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of average individuals. Consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Are you effectively ignoring your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, 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 (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 brand 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 part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful resources for monitoring social indicators. To continue reading this article, click here: 29 Media Measurement Tools That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part Two
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group