The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, you need to build and engage with a community around your company, services, and brand and “listen”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, spy on your competition, be alerted to disasters, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and identify opportunities for engagement. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific topics, products, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track social media channels like blogs, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms, discussion groups, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 marketing professionals, market researchers, online reputation management (ORM) specialists, professional sales reps, social engagement and community staff, and agencies. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed affordable tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
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 too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, see this article: Learn How To Grow Your Business With A WordPress Site
Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, 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 Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform 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 can be used to set up a social community on your WordPress website.
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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many 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 manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of plugins that allow 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 automatically syndicate content on social media networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social tracking tools and applications to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and business 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 your social networking sites.
Additionally, many applications and tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Online Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority 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. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations to gain 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site can help establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress website to automatically syndicate content on social channels.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to monitor social media allows you to discover and and perhaps even reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays researching social media and studying the 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, 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 outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. 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 brands have failed dismally.
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, compelling, informative 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss 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 Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing it more and more as time goes on, because it is becoming increasingly more important for high profile and even general 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 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business/brand and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 enough 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” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How well are you managing your online reputation in the web economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business, products or services through effective user review management. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For User Reviews Management
Understanding Online Trends
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 promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (how many news media outlets 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 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 One
In the next section we explore best social media monitoring resources for WordPress users. To read the rest of this article, click here: Media Measurement Resources For Business Owners – Part Two
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