The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s interconnected global economy, you need to build and nurture a social community around your services, company, and brand, all based around ”listening” to their needs and feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give you instant access to the latest news around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, services, or brand on social media, spy on your competition, measure the impact of campaigns, avert crises, and spot opportunities for engagement. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor volume and sentiments of social conversations and social activity on social media 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 professionals, digital reputation management (ORM) agencies, market research, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed affordable tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict what is being said online about your brand allowing you to react to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just 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 WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed here 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Discussion 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium provides 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
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, 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 and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication on various social networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tools to discover what consumers want, identify new business 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 those social networks.
Additionally, there are many apps that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these tools will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Brand And Credibility Online
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community finds out about it.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress site lets you automatically syndicate your content across various social media channels.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies research 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 increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content “Go 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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience 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 the next section of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this free 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 – 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
Managing Your Digital 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 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services 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 good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 yourself or your business and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also important. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody battle 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 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, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Are you effectively managing your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage customer reviews. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Monitoring Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Twitter, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (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 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 could 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 mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part two we explore social media monitoring resources every WordPress user should become familiar with. To read more, click on this link: WordPress Social Media Measurement Tools – Part 2
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"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)