The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static web page about your business is not enough. To succeed in today’s connected digital world, you need to build and engage with a community around your company, brand, and services and ”listen” to their feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news about your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, services, or brand on social media, spot opportunities for engagement, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, products, topics, or businesses.
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, often carried out by various groups that include online reputation management (ORM) agencies, market researchers, marketing professionals, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and sales teams. 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 digital reputation.
Fortunately various service providers have developed affordable tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their brands or products allowing them to respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social 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.
Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share 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 online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to run 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 users to easily share your web 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 automatically distribute content across various social channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social tools to discover what your target audience wants, identify new trends and opportunities and stay 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 your social networking sites.
Additionally, there are many apps and tools that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many applications and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Credibility And Brand
Building your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, 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 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 stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automate your web content syndication across social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to observe and discover the success strategies of experts, authorities, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies research social media 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 to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands 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, compelling, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article could 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 useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 many 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 other people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if things go 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 brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business/brand 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 around the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security agencies. Being able to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also important. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 enough good, positive things published online either to help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you know what customers are saying about you online?
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. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Customer Feedback Management
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 say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 and new content ideas (how many news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical 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 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 post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media monitoring. To read more, click on this link: Top Media Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part Two
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