The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve success in today’s interconnected world, you need to build and engage with a social community around your products, brand, and company, all based around ”listening” to their feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give you immediate access to the latest information around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, identify new opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, be alerted to disasters, and spy on your competition. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, businesses, topics, or brands.
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, often carried out by various groups that include market researchers, marketing teams, PR companies, social engagement and community personnel, professional sales reps, and agencies. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and really 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 application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: Everything You Need To Know To Grow Your Small Business Online With WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products 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, YouTube and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
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 contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
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 makes available many great plugins that allow users to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across social media networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social monitoring tools and applications allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and 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.
Also, many apps are available that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror 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 exposed online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automatically distribute your content on social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities 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 research 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 brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral”?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits 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 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 the next section of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content. 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. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard about 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 high profile and even general 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors 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 an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s 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 begin to repair any damage, 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business/brand and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of average individuals. Consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 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 anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have a system in place for managing your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing User Feedback
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated 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 (have you noticed how all news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section 1
In part two we explore 29 social media tracking tools for WordPress users. To read more, click on this link: Social Media Tracking Tools That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part Two
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