The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to build and nurture an engaged social community around your company, brand, and services and “listen”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest news about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, spot market opportunities, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, social media monitoring 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 management companies, marketing teams, market research, agencies, social engagement and community staff, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed affordable tools that facilitate the tracking of a wide range of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what consumers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, see this article: Using WordPress To Grow Your Business
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.
Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various 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 networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up 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
- Friend Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is known 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 plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
Many social media platforms 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 drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of great plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, 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 syndicate content across various social networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social media measuring tools and services allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay one step ahead of 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 of customers online. Many of these apps will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, 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 horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint 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 take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress blog to automatically distribute your content on social networks.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to observe and learn what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral “Hit”?
Many 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 succeeded virally while large brands have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, compelling, entertaining 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also discuss ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, 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 Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard about 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 many 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 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 brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now 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 impact with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies everywhere are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, and security departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also important. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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 your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you know what users are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. More information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing User Feedback
Predicting Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting 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 release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on Twitter, 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 (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical 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 a “go to” 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 business 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 1
In part 2 we explore more than 25 social media tracking resources for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Tools For Measuring Social Indicators – Part Two
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now