The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected world, you need to grow and nurture a community around your company, brand, and products, all based around ”listening” to what they have to say.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give you instant access to the latest news around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, and identify market opportunities. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, social monitoring 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 digital reputation specialists, marketing professionals, market researchers, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed affordable tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what is being said online about their brands or products so they can react to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
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, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article, 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 An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 content for social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up an online social community on your WordPress website.
BuddyPress is known 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 regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social 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 multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing 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 easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content across various social networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social tools to listen to what your market 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.
Also, there are tools that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand
Building your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress site to automatically distribute content across social media networks.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.
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. Connecting with others through social channels can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up 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 free course we also explore many 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 – Not Just For Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
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 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s 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 effects 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies all over the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. Being able to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the scenarios 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 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 anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective customer review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 and new content ideas (how many 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 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 may 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 others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Tools – Part Two
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org