The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a web page with static information. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your brand, company, and products.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest information about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, spy on the competition, be alerted to crises, spot opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, brands, topics, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social media channels like blogs, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., message boards, video/photo sharing websites, and user-generated content is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include market research, marketing professionals, PR companies, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed many tools that facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to track what consumers are saying about their brands so they can react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and extremely easy to use CMS 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 using the WP content management platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social business marketing opportunities.
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 Social Media With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Set up an online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
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 great plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your content across social media networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Use social media tools and services to listen to what your target audience wants, identify trends and new 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 run surveys online. Many of these tools will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Credibility And Brand
Strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, 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 online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. 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 exposed online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automate content syndication on social networks with an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and discover the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
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. Connecting with others through social channels can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
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 are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits 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, engaging, entertaining 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content. In this free 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 – Not Just For Big Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
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 others are saying about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. 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 competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now 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 diminishing the negative effects with an excess of positive content, 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/brand name and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the reputation of individuals. For example, consider these scenarios:
- 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you have a system in place to manage your online reputation in the online economy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective user review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations 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 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 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 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 others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore best social media measurement resources for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Media Tracking – 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