The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s highly connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a social community around your products, brand, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest information around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, assess competitor activity and mind share, be alerted to crises, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, 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 PR staff, market research, marketing professionals, sales teams, social engagement and community staff, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different providers have made available tools that facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress And Social Media – A Guide For Business Owners
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your business grow online, see this article: How To Grow Your Small Business Using A WordPress Site
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to tap into the full power social media 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.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing 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 plugin for WordPress)
This plugin allows you to set up a social community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online 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 web content syndication on social media networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social measuring tools allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify 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, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Brand And Online Reputation
Strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog can help establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automate content syndication across various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to discover and and maybe also reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities and influencers in your niche.
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. Using social media to explore new opportunities can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Go Viral” Online Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands and corporations 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, engaging, 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, 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
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard of 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. 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. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative impact with 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 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 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.
Many businesses are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security agencies. The ability to monitor the reputation of of average individuals is also very important. For example, consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to help your case.
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 later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective digital reputation management strategy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective user review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Client Reviews Management
Monitoring Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many 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 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 Section One
In part two we explore social media monitoring tools for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Tracking Tools – Part 2
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