The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to put up a web page with static information. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to build a community around your company, products, and brand, all based around “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest information around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, avert disasters, spot opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on your competitors. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
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, typically carried out by various people including marketing teams, market researchers, PR companies, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. 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 service providers have made available affordable tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and very 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 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friendship 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social 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 manage your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many great plugins that encourage users to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication on various social networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Using social tracking tools and services allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and 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, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these applications and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Brand And Online Reputation
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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 to comments and discussions 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 suffering heavy losses when the online community finds out about it.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automate your content syndication across various social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and and maybe even be inspired by the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Connecting with others through social channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “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 campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also explore many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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/brand name 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.
Businesses around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
How well are you managing your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Customer Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you are 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 say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, 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 channels 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 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 website or brand 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 social media tracking tools for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Tools – Part 2
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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