The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your company, brand, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, services, or company on social media, spy on the competition, measure the impact of campaigns, avert crises, and identify market opportunities. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific businesses, products, brands, or topics.
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, often carried out by various people including marketing teams, market researchers, online reputation management companies, social engagement and community staff, sales teams, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately different service providers have created affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a wide range of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business,etc.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it 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 the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into the full power of social media.
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 Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes built-in social features, like interactive 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 various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 your content on social media channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social marketing tools allows you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify new opportunities and stay 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 are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, 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 and how you respond to users online 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 paying a heavy price when the online community finds out about it.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress site to automate your content syndication on various social media channels.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of authorities 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. Connecting with others through social channels can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed.
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, engaging, entertaining or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article can 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. In this course we also explore 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 Global Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
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 high profile and even general 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 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your business 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 companies 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 diluting the negative effects with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you from spreading further, 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/brand 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 website or person directly, etc.
Businesses are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the online 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support the things you have listed in 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 the situation in a timely manner.
Managing digital reputation should not be avoided if you want your business to grow in the web economy.
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage user reviews. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (have you noticed how all news media broadcasters 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 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 may end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part 2 we explore 25+ social media measurement resources for WordPress users. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: WordPress Social Media Monitoring : Useful Resources – Part Two
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