The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected digital economy, you need to grow and nurture a social community around your brand, services, and company, based around ”listening” to what they have to say.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give you instant access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, be alerted to disasters, identify market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, brands, businesses, or topics.
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 people including PR companies, market researchers, marketing teams, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many service providers have created a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the active tracking of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and really easy to use CMS 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 why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your small business grow and succeed online, see this article: The Business Owner’s Guide To WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part Two 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.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
Many social media platforms 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 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 great plugins that allow your site visitors to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication across social media channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social media tools and services to discover what consumers want, identify new opportunities and stay 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, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many apps and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, 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 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 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 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 a credible authority in your niche, but it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automate your web content syndication across social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer what experts in your niche are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 channels can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Online Viral Sensation?
Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, 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 have created an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss 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 Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard about 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 many individuals and brands to track what others are saying about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative impact with an excess of positive material, 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business/brand name and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. Consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 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 an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you have a system to manage your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective customer review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Customer Feedback Management
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which 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 release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 (how many news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement resources. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Resources For Social Media Tracking – Part Two
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