The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your brand, company, and products.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest information around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and mind share, measure the impact of campaigns, identify new opportunities for engagement, and avert disasters. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific brands, businesses, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social media channels like blogs, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms, message boards, 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 people including marketing teams, market research, online reputation managers, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and social marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many service providers have made available affordable tools that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, 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.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress includes built-in social features, like 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 article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to run a social networking community on your WordPress site.
BuddyPress is known as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin has a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro 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 Mail
- Notification Bar
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple 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 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 makes available many great plugins that allow users to share your content 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 web content across various social channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Using social media tools allows you to listen to what your market wants, identify new business 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.
Also, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many applications will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, and listen to their conversations to gain 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.
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, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress site can automatically syndicate content across social networks.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large 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, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article can 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 engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss many 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 – 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
You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). 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 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 businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative impact with positive content, 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business/brand 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 businesses are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring conversations and interactions on social media extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you know what customers are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective customer review management. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Client Reviews Management
Analyzing Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 channels now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting content with added 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 site or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part two we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement resources. To continue reading this article, click here: Best Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now