The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected global economy, you need to build an engaged social community around your products, company, and brand, based around ”listening” to their feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest information about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your products, brand, or company on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spot market opportunities, and avert crises. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, products, brands, or topics.
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 a cross-section of people including online reputation management (ORM) agencies, marketing teams, market research, sales teams, social engagement and community staff, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many providers have made available affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable 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.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your small business grow online, go here: Everything You Need To Know To Grow Your Business Online With A WordPress Blog
Using some of the tools listed in 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 makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social Media Networks 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friendship 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
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 makes available many great plugins that allow your site visitors 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 your content on social channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social media tools and services to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay one step 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 networking sites.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility Online
Strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, 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 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 comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated 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 take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automate your content syndication on various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress 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.
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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most 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 are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands and corporations have failed to take off.
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 “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also explore many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more information, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about 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 negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your 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 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 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 person directly, etc.
Businesses around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring conversations and new conversations on social media extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
How are you managing your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business through effective user review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what 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 promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (have you noticed how all news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 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 website 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 One
In the next section we explore social media measurement tools for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking Resources – Part Two
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