The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s connected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your products, brand, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, and avert impending crises. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific brands, businesses, topics, or products.
As a tool for business intelligence, social media 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 marketing teams, online reputation management (ORM) companies, market researchers, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track consumer behavior around your products or brand so you can react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – A Guide For Website Owners
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in 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 for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress includes 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
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
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium 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 Messaging
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share 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 online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to run most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content on various social networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Use social tools and services to listen to what your target audience wants, identify new trends and 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.
Also, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many of these tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Online Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 users online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate content on social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and learn what experts and thought leaders in your niche are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content Be The Next Online Viral Sensation?
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “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 advertising 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 in your audience 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 an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this course we also explore many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard the term 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 posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your brand 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 image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing 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 or your brand from spreading further, 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 yourself 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.
Businesses all over the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider the situations below:
- 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 the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have a system to manage your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective user review management. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets 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 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 (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 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 may 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 Part 1
In the next section we explore social media measurement tools for WordPress. To keep reading, click on this link: Essential Social Media Tools For Business Owners – Part 2
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