The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page on your site about your company or products is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s interconnected digital world, you need to build a community around your products, company, and brand, based around actively “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your services, brand, or company on social media, spy on your competitors, spot opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and avert disasters. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, brands, topics, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to track 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 marketing professionals, market research, digital reputation management (ORM) specialists, social media marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, small businesses don’t 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 companies have developed many affordable tools that facilitate the tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and really easy to use content publishing 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.
To learn more about using the WP platform please see our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 Your Social Media 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
This free plugin allows you to run your own social community on your website.
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 plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network 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 Mail
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social 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 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 great plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication on social media channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Using social tools and applications allows you to discover what your audience wants, identify new trends and business 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 your social networking sites.
Also, many apps and tools are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, 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 genuine and meaningful. 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 and how you respond to users online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website 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 customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automate content syndication on social media with an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and discover what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Go Viral” Online Faster
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, informative or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two 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 compelling content. In this free course we also explore 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 – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term 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 posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff 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 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 defeating the negative effects with 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 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 yourself or your business and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they ignore their online reputations.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond large corporations, 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 a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 enough 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 about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have a system to manage your online reputation in the web economy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective user review management. See this page to learn more: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Client 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 announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news media outlets now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media monitoring. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement Resources – Part Two
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