The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected world, you need to build an engaged community around your company, products, and brand, all based around “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give you immediate access to the latest information about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on your competitors, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by online users, and spot market opportunities. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., discussion groups, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 groups that include marketing teams, market research, online reputation management companies, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many service providers have created many tools that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track what is being said online about your products or brand allowing you to react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media – A Guide For Website Owners
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use CMS 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 please click on links to visit 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products 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, 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 article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured 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:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friendship 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social 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 many plugins that encourage users to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 syndicate content across social media networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social tools and services allows you to discover what your audience wants, identify trends and 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 your social accounts.
Also, many apps are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Building your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site can automate content syndication on various social networks.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral Sensation?
Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands have failed dismally.
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, 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. 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 details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard the term 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 is being said about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. 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. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation 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 begin to stop negative things being said about you from spreading further, 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 come in. 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 person directly, etc.
Companies are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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, it’s good to create an easy “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.
Do you have a system in place to manage your online reputation in the web economy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Client Reviews Management
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 (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. 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore WordPress and media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Resources Every Business Owner Should Know About – Part 2
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