The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected global and digital economy, you need to build and nurture an engaged social community around your company, products, and brand and ”listen” to what they have to say.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you instant access to the latest buzz around 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 campaigns, spot opportunities for engagement, spy on your competition, and help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, brands, topics, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, social media signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include market research, digital reputation management (ORM) specialists, marketing teams, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content publishing 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.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: A Beginner’s Guide To Building A Successful Small Business With A WordPress Site
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to tap into the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market 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 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.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friend 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking 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 Messages
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to manage most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that encourage users to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, 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 automate web content syndication across social media channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tools to discover what your target audience wants, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step ahead of 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 conduct surveys and polls online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise
Building your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, 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 other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as 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, it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automate content syndication on various social channels with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and discover what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.
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 increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral”?
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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.
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, entertaining or even funny, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss 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 Big Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard of 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 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 other people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 diluting the negative with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 your name or your business/brand name 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.
Many companies are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring conversations and interactions on social media extends beyond global brands, celebrities, and security-related departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. Consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Are you effectively managing your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Client 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 promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (how many news media agencies 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 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 site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore WordPress social media tracking tools. To continue reading, click here: WordPress And Media Measurement – Part Two
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