The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s connected world, you need to grow, nurture and engage with a community around your services, brand, and company and “listen”.
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 products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, assess competitor activity, measure the impact of campaigns, identify market opportunities, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track conversations and social activity on 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 groups that include market research, online reputation management (ORM) specialists, marketing professionals, professional sales reps, agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many service providers have made available tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what is being said online about their products or brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 CMS platform please see our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, you will be able to tap into the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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, Pinterest 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 marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up a 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to run 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 many great plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication on social media channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social marketing tools and services to discover what consumers want, identify new 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, many apps are available that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these apps will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, 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 online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. 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 blog can help establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven site to automate web content syndication across various social networks.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and and perhaps even reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your business seen, 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 dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands 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, 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you run 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 course we also explore many 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard the term 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 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 will tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative 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 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 bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their online reputations.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. Being able to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also important. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 support the things you have listed in 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 does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you have an digital reputation management strategy?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy User Feedback Management
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos 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 (how many news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 information that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress resources and social media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking : Useful Resources – Part 2
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org