The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a web page with static information. To succeed in today’s connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged 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 immediate access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, products, or brand on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, avert disasters, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on the competition. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific topics, products, businesses, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, 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 groups that include marketing professionals, market research, PR staff, sales teams, social media marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different providers have made available a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond to conversations and interact with online users in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article and a WordPress site, 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 is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social Media 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run 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 has an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium offers 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
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of 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 great plugins that allow users to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication on social media networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Social tools and services allow you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and 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.
Also, there are applications that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand Online
Strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic 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 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 situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automate content syndication across various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large 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, 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss many ways to create content with 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
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 more people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative material 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 now an issue that 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 reducing the negative effects with an excess of 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you have a system in place to manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective user review management. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Tracking Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate 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 release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 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 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 a “go to” destination or resource for your niche or industry. People could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore top social media tracking resources for WordPress users. To keep reading, click on this link: Best Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
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