The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your business and services is no longer enough. To achieve business success in today’s connected digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your services, brand, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give you immediate access to the latest news about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or products on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, assess competitor activity, avert disasters, and identify market opportunities. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include marketing teams, PR staff, market research, social media marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many technology companies have developed a range of affordable and even free tools to facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too 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 our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the full power social media 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.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social 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 content for various social networks.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site 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:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is known 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 plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking 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
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social 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 simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that allow users to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. 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 various social channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Social media tools and applications allow you to discover what your market wants, identify new opportunities and stay 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 those social networks.
Additionally, many applications and tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automatically syndicate your content across social networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what the experts are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral “Hit”?
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 are outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns 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, compelling, 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 provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many ways to create content with 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 – Not Just For Global Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). 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 others are saying about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. 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 competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that 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 weakening 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 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 find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many businesses around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not effectively managing their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Are you effectively ignoring your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective customer review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, 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 goes viral on Facebook, 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 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 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 information that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part two we explore WordPress social media measurement and useful tools. To continue reading this article, click here: 30 Social Media Tools That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part 2
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