The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged social community around your brand, products, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you instant access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, assess competitor activity and market dominance, and identify opportunities for engagement. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of groups that include marketing professionals, market research, online reputation management (ORM) companies, agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed affordable tools that facilitate the tracking of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage 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.
To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress platform please see other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social 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, YouTube 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 article titles and descriptions for various 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
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up an online social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- Member Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Multiple 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 most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that encourage users to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, 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 distribute content on various social networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social tools to discover what consumers want, identify new 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 your social network pages.
Also, there are many applications that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these apps and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage 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 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 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 customer situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It can help establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automate content syndication on various social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what experts in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this course we also explore ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)
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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before 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 material online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to 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, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative effects with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business/brand and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies all around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the online reputation of average individuals. Consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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 an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have a strategy for managing your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Customer Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 can provide 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. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 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 information that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore social media monitoring resources for WordPress. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: WordPress Social Media Monitoring Tools – Part 2
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)