The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected digital economy, you need to grow and nurture a community around your products, company, and brand, all based around ”listening” to what they have to say.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news around your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spot potential opportunities for engagement, assess competitor activity and mind share, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and be alerted to impending crises. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, topics, products, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of people including marketing teams, digital reputation managers, market researchers, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to track consumer behavior around their brands so they can react to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: Understanding WordPress – A Small Business Owner’s Guide
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, 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 is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes 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, 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 social networkign sites.
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 WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Online 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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium 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 social features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to drive most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many great plugins that allow users to 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 automate web content syndication across various social networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Social tools and applications allow you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and 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 network pages.
Also, there are many applications and tools that let you run surveys online. Many tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise
Building your business reputation and brand, 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 genuine and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community finds out about it.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automatically syndicate your content across social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, and thought leaders in your niche.
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 channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” 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 you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large and well-funded campaigns have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in the next section of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
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 is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your 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 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/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.
Businesses are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively monitoring their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 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” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Are you managing your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage user reviews. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 agencies 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 a “go to” 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 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 Section One
In the next section we explore social media tracking resources for WordPress users. To read more, click here: WordPress Resources For Media Monitoring – Part Two
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