The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to build an engaged social community around your company, brand, and products, all based around “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you instant access to the latest news about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, identify potential opportunities for engagement, spy on the competition, measure the impact of campaigns, and avert impending crises. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific businesses, topics, products, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, social media signal monitoring 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, PR staff, marketing teams, sales teams, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately different providers have developed affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify what consumers are saying about their brands or products so they can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – A Guide For Business Owners
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and really easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it 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 the benefits of using the WP platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products 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, YouTube 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.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website 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
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion 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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- 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 posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online 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 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 web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication on various social networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social media marketing tools and applications allow you to discover what your target audience wants, identify trends and new opportunities and stay one step 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 those social networks.
Additionally, there are applications that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations for 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 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 poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automate your content syndication on various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and and maybe even be inspired by what the experts are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget and well-funded campaigns 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, engaging, informative or even funny, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard the term 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative effects with an excess of 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business/brand name and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Businesses are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider these situations:
- 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 enough good, positive things published online either to help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still 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.
Online reputation management should not be avoided if you want your business to grow in the digital economy.
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business, products or services through effective user review management. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Client Feedback
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 can provide 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 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 a “go to” 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 content that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore 29 media monitoring tools for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: Top Social Media Resources For Business Owners – Part Two
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