The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your company, brand, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your products, brand, or company on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, identify new market opportunities, and help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by online users. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include marketing teams, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, market researchers, social engagement and community personnel, professional sales reps, and social marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different providers have made available tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their brands or products allowing them to react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use 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.
To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, go here: Using A WordPress Blog To Grow Your Small Business
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services 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, 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 content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Multiple 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 many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
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 offers many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication across various social media channels with WordPress.
Market Research
Use social tools and applications to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and 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 those social networks.
Additionally, there are apps that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise
Building your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, 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. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog 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 clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute your web content on social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what the experts are doing right.
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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “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 clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, informative or even funny, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. 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 – Not Just For Big Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 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 material online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative impact 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 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 your name or your business/brand and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. Consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody battle 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 the things you have listed in 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, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
How do you manage your online reputation in the online economy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Customer Reviews
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you are 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 social media, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (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. Posting regular 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 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part two we explore WordPress and social media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: 29 Media Measurement Resources For WordPress Users – Part Two
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