The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your company, products, and brand.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest news about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, identify new market opportunities, assess competitor activity and market share, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, businesses, products, 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, typically carried out by various groups that include market researchers, online reputation specialists, marketing professionals, social media marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the active tracking of a broad range of social media channels, enabling you to track what is being said online about your brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and very easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it 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 please see other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part 2 of 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 is 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 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress 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 network on your WordPress site, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.
BuddyPress is known as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin has an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many 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 from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on various social networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social tools and services to listen to what your audience wants, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay ahead of your competition.
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 networking sites.
Additionally, many apps and tools are available that let you run surveys online. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust 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. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community gets hold of the news.
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 website lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automate your content syndication across various social channels using an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays 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 increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations have failed.
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 Part 2 of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally 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 (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 high profile and even general 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 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses 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 companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative impact with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies everywhere are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they ignore their online reputations.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- 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 support the things you have listed in your job application.
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 respond in a timely manner.
Are you managing your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective user review management. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 and new content ideas (how many news media broadcasters now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful tools for monitoring social metrics. To keep reading this article, click on this link: Essential Social Media Tools Every WordPress User Should Know About – Part Two
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