The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your brand, services, 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 information around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, services, or company on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on your competitors, spot market opportunities, and be alerted to crises. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific brands, topics, businesses, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor social media channels like blogging, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Medium, 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, typically carried out by a cross-section of groups that include market research, marketing professionals, digital reputation management companies, sales teams, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed affordable tools that facilitate the monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand or products so you can respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Monitoring Tools
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content management 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 WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Using A WordPress Site To Grow Your Small Business
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of 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 The Right Audience On Social Media 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up your own online social community on your site.
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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium 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
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your 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 marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on social media with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social tools to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step 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.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Brand And Online Reputation
Strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, 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. 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions 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 being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as 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 an authority in your niche, but it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress website can automatically syndicate content on various social networks.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to monitor social media allows you to 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 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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits 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 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 the next section of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this free course we also discuss 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 Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard about 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 many individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative material 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 companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative impact with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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 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 website or person directly, etc.
Many companies are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are still ignoring their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of average individuals is also important. Consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. More information: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting 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 release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 (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 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement resources. To continue reading this article, click here: 30 Social Media Tools That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part 2
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum