The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a web page with static information. To achieve success in today’s connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your products, company, and brand.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, services, or brand on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, be alerted to impending crises, spot market opportunities, and spy on your competitors. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
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, often carried out by a cross-section of people including marketing teams, online reputation management (ORM) specialists, market researchers, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and sales teams. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately many service providers have made available affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the tracking of a wide range of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what consumers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about their 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 and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and really easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it 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 WordPress platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part Two 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various 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 site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is known 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 plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium 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 Mail
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- 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 Social Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social media 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 offers a number of great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on social media using WordPress.
Market Research
Social media measuring tools allow you to discover what your audience wants, identify new business opportunities and stay one step ahead of 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.
Additionally, many apps are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications can be integrated with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Credibility And Brand
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on 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 paying a heavy price when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute content across social channels using an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and and maybe also be inspired by the success strategies of authorities and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Most 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 are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, informative or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. 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 information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can 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 about 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 will tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that 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 diluting the negative impact with positive material, 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business/brand and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Businesses all over the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively monitoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, and security-related agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 enough good, positive things published online either to support the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective system in place to manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective user review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing User Feedback
Tracking Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social monitoring tools. To read more, click on this link: 30 Social Media Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now