The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s interconnected global economy, you need to grow, nurture and engage with a social community around your products, brand, and company, based around actively “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest information around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, and identify opportunities for engagement. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, businesses, topics, 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, typically carried out by a cross-section of groups that include market research, marketing professionals, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many providers have made available affordable tools to facilitate the active tracking of a broad range of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their brands or products allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just 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, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS platform 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 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Use this plugin to run an online social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
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 regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium 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
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to pages and posts 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 online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to run 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 many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. 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 social networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social media tools and services to listen to what your target audience wants, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay 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 your social networking sites.
Also, there are many apps that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Brand And Credibility Online
Strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, 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 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 comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website 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 new visitors to your business.
(Automate web content syndication on various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you discover and even be inspired by the success strategies of experts and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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. Using social media to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Go Viral” Online Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands have failed to take off.
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, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also explore 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 – Not Just For Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
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 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 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, 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 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 your name or your business 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 website or person directly, etc.
Businesses around the world are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively monitoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. The ability to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 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 about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 (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 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 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress and media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: Essential Media Measurement Resources Every Business Owner Should Know About – Part Two
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