The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to put up a web page with static information. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your services, company, and brand.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, services, or company on social media, assess competitor activity and market dominance, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, identify opportunities for engagement, and avert crises. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, topics, businesses, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor social activity on social media 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 people including online reputation managers, market research, marketing professionals, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to track what is being said online about their brands or products so they can respond to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and very easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 the vehicle that can help your small business grow online, see this article: Using A WordPress Site To Grow A Successful Business Online
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To The Right Audience 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 various social networks.
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 network site, 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:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Discussion 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 plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who require 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 posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are services and tools 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 manage 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 encourage users to easily 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 distribute content across social networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social media marketing tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay ahead of your competition.
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, there are many applications that let you run surveys online. Many tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 to comments and discussions online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog can automate web content syndication across social media.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to discover and and perhaps even reverse engineer what the experts are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies research social media 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 to explore new opportunities can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget 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, informative or “spot-on”, 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore ways to create content that has 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 – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard of online reputation management. 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. 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 competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage 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 weakening the negative impact 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 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.
Businesses around the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. Consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody battle 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you have an digital reputation management strategy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user reviews. More info: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Tracking 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 announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, 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 provides 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. Posting regular topical 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore WordPress tools and media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Measurement Resources For WordPress Users – Part Two
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie