The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static web page about your company or services is not enough. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected world, you need to build and nurture an engaged community around your brand, company, and services, based around “listening”.
Social 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.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, spot market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, and be alerted to crises. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, products, brands, or topics.
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, typically carried out by a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, digital reputation managers, marketing teams, agencies, social engagement and community staff, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various providers have created tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, enabling you to track what is being said online about your products or brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to tap into the full power of social media.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various 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-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Discussion 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 an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share 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 manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your web content across various social media channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Use social tools to discover what your audience wants, identify new opportunities and stay ahead of your competition.
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 many applications and tools that let you run surveys online. Many of these apps and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication 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 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 comments and discussions online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, but it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress website helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you automate content syndication across social networks.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to monitor social media can help you reverse engineer what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays researching social media and studying the 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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral Sensation?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large 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, 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this free course we also discuss many ways to create content with 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can 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 about 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 it said before 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 competing companies could be posting negative material 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 now an issue that 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 reducing the negative with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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 name and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Businesses are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not effectively monitoring their online reputations.
Monitoring conversations and new posts on social media extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the reputation of individuals. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- 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 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 about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Managing digital reputation is important in the digital economy.
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which 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 say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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. Posting regular topical content with additional 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part two we explore dozens of social media monitoring resources every business owner should know about. To read more, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Tools – Part Two
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