The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your company, services, and brand.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you instant access to the latest information about your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or services on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, spy on your competitors, and identify potential opportunities for engagement. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, products, businesses, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to track activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, social networking sites, micro-blogging platforms, discussion boards, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 professionals, digital reputation specialists, market research, sales teams, social media marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various service providers have developed affordable tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify what consumers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about your products or brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and engage 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 trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 please see other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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, YouTube 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 article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
This free plugin allows you to set up and run your own social networking community on your website.
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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- 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
With most social media tools, syndicating your content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels 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 offers many plugins that allow users to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication across various social media channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social tools and applications allows you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify new trends and 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 your social networking sites.
Also, there are applications that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many apps will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a 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 provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress site lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you automate web content syndication across social channels.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and even reverse engineer the success strategies of experts and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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. Connecting with others through social media channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget 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, compelling, informative 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 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. In this free course we also explore ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online 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 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage 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, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 name 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 person directly, etc.
Many companies are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. Being able to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also very important. Consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective digital reputation management strategy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Customer Reviews Management
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of what 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 get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 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 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 other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore WordPress tools for media tracking. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Tools: Media Monitoring – Part 2
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