The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected global economy, you need to build, nurture and engage with a social community around your company, products, and brand, based around actively “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest information about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your products, company, or brand on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spot market opportunities, assess competitor activity and mind share, and be alerted to disasters. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific businesses, topics, products, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor trends, 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 a cross-section of people including marketing teams, online reputation management companies, market research, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the active tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to respond to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very easy to use 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.
For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, see this article: Using A WordPress Site To Grow A Successful Small Business
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 business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos 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 ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Discussion 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 plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium 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
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that allow users to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication across social media networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social tools allows you to discover what your target audience wants, identify trends and 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 your social accounts.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these apps and tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand
Building your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on 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 situation or customer complaint poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automate your content syndication across social media with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to listen to social conversations can help you observe and and maybe also reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time researching social media and studying the 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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Web Content Be The Next Online Viral Sensation?
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands and corporations have failed.
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 even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore ways to create content that has 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 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 will tell 10 more people about it. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies all over the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, and security-related agencies. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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, you can still create a “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.
Do you have a system for managing your online reputation in the web economy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
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 publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 (have you noticed how all news media outlets 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 a “go to” 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 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 great social media tools for WordPress users. To read more, click here: 29 Social Media Tracking Resources Every WordPress User Should Know About – Part Two
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