The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s connected global economy, you need to build and engage with a community around your company, services, and brand, based around actively ”listening” to what they have to say.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest news around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spot market opportunities, spy on your competitors, and be alerted to crises. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, products, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, social media 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 people including market research, marketing teams, PR companies, professional sales reps, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many providers have developed affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands so they can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and extremely easy to use CMS 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 the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: The Small Business Owner’s Guide To WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to tap into the full power of marketing your business on social media.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Social Media 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friend 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to drive most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, 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 social media using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social media tools and services allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and business 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 pages.
Additionally, many apps are available that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand
Building and strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, and listen to their conversations to gain valuable insights.
Remember, we are born with 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 other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.
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, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of 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 valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automate web content syndication on various social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and learn the success strategies of experts and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “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 big-budget brands and corporations have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users in your audience 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 Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an 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 that has 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 – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard the term 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 others are saying 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. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if this goes 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 companies 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 weakening the negative effects with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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 your name or your business 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 person directly, etc.
Many businesses are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. There’s also the reputation of individuals. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Managing digital reputation is important in the digital economy.
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage user reviews. More information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing User Reviews
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get 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 goes viral 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 (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 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part two we explore dozens of social media measurement resources for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media Measurement – Part 2
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