The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a page on your site with static information about your business or products is no longer enough. To achieve success in today’s interconnected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your brand, company, and products.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give you immediate access to the latest information around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, avert crises, identify new market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social media 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, market research, PR companies, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and sales teams. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of providers have made available tools and solutions that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their brands or products so they can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: An Online Guide To Growing A Successful Business With A WordPress Site
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes 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 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, YouTube 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 article titles and descriptions for social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up your own social community 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Online 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 Multiple Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of plugins that allow users to easily share your content online 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 automatically distribute your web content on various social media channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social media measuring tools and services allows you to discover what your target audience wants, identify new trends and 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 your social network pages.
Additionally, there are many apps that let you run surveys online. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Brand And Credibility
Building your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment 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 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 comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
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 website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute content on social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you observe and and perhaps also be inspired by what the experts are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
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 you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands and corporations have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, 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 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 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 reducing the negative impact with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not effectively monitoring their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring conversations and new conversations on social media extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 the things you have listed in 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 about you do come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Managing digital reputation is important in the online economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Client Reviews
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of which 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, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news media channels now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular content with your 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 site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part 2 we explore WordPress and media monitoring. To read the rest of this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Tools For Measuring Social Indicators – Part 2
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