The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static web page about your company and services is no longer enough. To achieve success in today’s connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your brand, company, and products.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give you direct access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, services, or company on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, identify market opportunities, avert crises, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific businesses, topics, products, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor 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 management companies, market research, marketing professionals, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed many tools to facilitate the monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their brands or products allowing them to react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and extremely easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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, Pinterest 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.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion 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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro 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 your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow users to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your web content on various social networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Using social tools and applications allows you to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay 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 run surveys online. Many apps and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Brand And Reputation
Strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid 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 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 poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven site to automate web content syndication across various social channels.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and discover what the experts are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content “Go 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 large brands and corporations have failed.
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 even funny, 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 will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many 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 can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
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 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 other people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative 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 discover 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 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 around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond 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 user reviews. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Reviews Management For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new 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 publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral 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 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. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media monitoring. To read more, click on this link: WordPress And Social Media Measurement – 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