The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your company, brand, and products.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give you instant access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, products, or company on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, be alerted to impending crises, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include market researchers, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, marketing teams, sales teams, social engagement and community staff, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed many tools that facilitate the active tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to track consumer behavior around their brands or products allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just 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 the benefits of using WordPress 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 this article, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Media Networks 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, 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 CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Many 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 drive most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that allow users to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across social channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social monitoring tools and applications to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and business 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.
Additionally, many apps and tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand
Building your brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on the needs of 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 to users online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when 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, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress blog can automate your content syndication across various social media networks.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of authorities 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 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 channels can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “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 advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.
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, engaging, 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. 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 – Not Just For Global Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 is being said about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, good 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 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 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/brand name and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies all over the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. The ability 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 battle 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 an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you know what customers are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective customer review management. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on social media, 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 and new content ideas (have you noticed how all news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 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 business 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 Part One
In part two we explore top media monitoring resources for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Monitoring : Resources – Part Two
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum