The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your products, brand, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spot opportunities for engagement, and help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by online users. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, brands, businesses, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor social activity on social media channels like blogs, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, etc., message boards, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including marketing professionals, market researchers, digital reputation management companies, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and sales teams. 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 service providers have made available many tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only 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 platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using the WordPress CMS platform please see our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that allow users to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across social media using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Use social media measuring tools and services to discover what your audience wants, identify new trends and opportunities and stay one step 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 your social networking sites.
Additionally, many apps are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Brand And Credibility Online
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. 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 and how you respond to users online 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 suffering heavy losses when 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 blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you automate content syndication on various social media channels.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 channels can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Online Viral Sensation?
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 are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget 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, informative or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). 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 will tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative effects 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 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 and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies around the world are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are still ignoring their online reputations.
Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 a lot of 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 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 digital reputation management strategy in place for your business?
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage user feedback. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing User Feedback
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (have you noticed how all news media outlets now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users 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 monitoring tools. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Tracking Resources – Part Two
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