The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your brand, services, and company.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, and identify opportunities for engagement. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, topics, businesses, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, 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 groups that include online reputation specialists, marketing teams, market researchers, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and agencies. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed many affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to track what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about your brand allowing you to respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking 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 online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Understanding WordPress – A Small Business Owner’s Guide
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up an online social network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, 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 boasts a thriving 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 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 posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your web content on various social media networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social tracking tools and services to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and 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 network pages.
Additionally, many apps and tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 and how you respond online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress blog can automate content syndication on various social media networks.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to observe and even reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, 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 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 name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, 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 have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful 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 info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management. 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 is being said 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 will tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to 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, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative effects with an excess of 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 your name or your business and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses around the world are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, and security-related agencies. The ability to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also 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 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 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.
Online reputation management is important in the online economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage user reviews. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of which 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 announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 media outlets 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or brand 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 One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media monitoring. To read more, click on this link: 29 Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress – Part Two
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)