The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s connected global economy, you need to grow, nurture and engage with a social community around your company, brand, and services and “listen”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest information about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, assess competitor activity, identify potential market opportunities, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users, and measure the impact of campaigns. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, topics, businesses, or products.
As a tool for business intelligence, social signal 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 market research, marketing professionals, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and agencies. 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 technology companies have developed many tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand so you can react to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – A Guide For Business Owners
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content management 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.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, see this article: WordPress In Small Business – An Online Guide To Building A Successful Business With A WordPress Blog
Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article and a WordPress site, 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 for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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, 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 article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up your own social networking community on your site.
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 application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple 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 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 plugins that encourage users 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 web content syndication across social media with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social media tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay one step ahead of many 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 those social networks.
Additionally, there are many apps that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Brand And Credibility
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress website to automate your content syndication on various social media channels.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you observe and and maybe also be inspired by the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?
Most 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 are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 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 will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore many ways to create content that has 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 Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing about it more and more as time goes on, because it is becoming increasingly more important for many 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 tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies 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 content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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 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.
Many companies all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. Consider the situations below:
- 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 enough 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” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you have a system in place for managing your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Tracking Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 (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 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 1
In part two we explore WordPress resources for social media measurement. To continue reading this article, click on this link: 29 Social Media Monitoring Tools For Business Owners – Part 2
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