The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your brand, services, and company.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give you instant access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, spot market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on the competition. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific topics, products, brands, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor social media channels like blogging, internet forums, social networking sites, micro-blogging platforms, discussion boards, video/photo sharing websites, 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 groups that include online reputation management (ORM) agencies, marketing teams, market researchers, social media marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand so you can react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – A Guide For Business Owners
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and 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.
For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, see this article: Learn How To Grow Your Business With WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article and a WordPress site, 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 is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience 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 article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Online 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 contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers 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 social features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating 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 time and money.
If you want to drive 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 has a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 syndicate content across social networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Social media tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new 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 those social networks.
Also, many tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automate content syndication on various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of experts and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 grow your revenue, get your brand seen, 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 are out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging 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 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)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 is being said 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 will tell 10 other people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative with 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 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.
Businesses are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security departments. There’s also the reputation of individuals. Consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what people are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations 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. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 an authoritative 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 other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part two we explore WordPress and social media and useful resources for measuring social activities. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Tracking Tools – Part Two
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