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 community around your products, brand, and company and ”listen” to their feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give you direct access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spy on the competition, avert disasters, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spot market opportunities. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, brands, topics, or businesses.
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, typically carried out by a cross-section of people including PR staff, market researchers, marketing teams, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the active monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their brands or products allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage CMS 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.
To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 of 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 for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social Networks 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 content for social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
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 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 regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media tools 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 drive your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that allow users to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content on various social media channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tools and applications to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new 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, many tools are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these apps and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Brand And Credibility Online
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a 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 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 and how you respond online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automate your web content syndication across social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress website.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to observe and and perhaps also reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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 grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, 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 the next section of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many 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 – Not Just For Global 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
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard about 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 said is negative. 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative material 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 firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses 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 effects 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 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 your name or your business and spot a negative comment or review, 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 retain existing ones because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. The ability to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also important. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 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 an easy “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.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective customer review management. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Customer Feedback Management
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you are 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 release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 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 topical content with additional 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 may end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress tools and social media measurement. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two
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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)