The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s connected global and digital economy, you need to build an engaged social community around your products, company, and brand and “listen”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news about your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, spy on the competition, identify new opportunities for engagement, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by online users, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include marketing teams, market research, PR agencies, professional sales reps, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various service providers have developed many tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict what is being said online about your products or brand allowing you to respond to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog 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 provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers 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, 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 content for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress allows you to set up and run a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium 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 Messages
- Notification Bar
- Member Directory
- Groups
- 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 Many Social Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content on various social media networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social tools allows you to listen to 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, many apps and tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Online Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations to gain 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automate content syndication across various social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and even be inspired by what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing.
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 channels can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many 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 money at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, 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 the next section of this article can 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 course we also explore many ways to create content that has 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
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management. 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 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 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies 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 now an issue that 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 weakening the negative impact with an excess of positive material, 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business/brand name and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. There’s also the online reputation of average individuals. For example, consider the following situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 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 respond in a timely manner.
How well do you manage your online reputation in the online economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage user reviews. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Management Of Customer Feedback
Monitoring 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 promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 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. Posting regular 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 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 information that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore WordPress social media measurement and tools. To continue reading, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Resources For Monitoring Social Performance – Part Two
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group