The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your brand, products, and company.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest news around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, identify potential opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track activity, trends, and volume and sentiments of online conversations on social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including market researchers, digital reputation management (ORM) specialists, marketing teams, social engagement and community personnel, professional sales reps, and social marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed many affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to track what consumers are saying about your brand allowing you to respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage 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.
To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit 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 An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage an online social networking community on your site, with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- 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 your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple 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 strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, 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 on various social media networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Use social media measuring tools and services to listen to what consumers want, 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 pages.
Also, there are applications that let you survey customers online. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations to gain valuable insights.
Remember, we are born with 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 situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community finds out about it.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also be extremely 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 your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress site lets you automatically syndicate your web content on social media networks.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what authorities and influencers 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. Connecting with others through social channels can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling 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 info, 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 can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
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 others are saying 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 competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that 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 defeating the negative impact with positive content, 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 come in. 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 address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses everywhere are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are still ignoring their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. 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 enough good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Are you ignoring your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage user reviews. To learn more, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
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 say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical 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 website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore social media monitoring resources for WordPress users. To read more, click on this link: Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress – Part 2
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