The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve business success in today’s connected world, you need to grow, nurture and engage with a community around your brand, company, and services and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give you instant access to the latest news around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users, identify market opportunities, and assess competitor activity and market dominance. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, businesses, products, or topics.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, online reputation managers, marketing professionals, professional sales reps, agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to track what consumers are saying about your brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content management 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.
To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, go here: Everything You Need To Know To Grow Your Business Online Using A WordPress Blog
Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into 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.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with built-in social features, like interactive 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 networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online 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 regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium 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 Mail
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- 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 Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to manage 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 offers many plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 syndicate content across social networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Social measuring tools allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new 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 those social networks.
Also, there are many apps that let you survey customers online. Many of these tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility And Showcase Your Talent
Building your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate content on various social networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you observe and learn what the experts are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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. Connecting with others through social media channels can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral Sensation?
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large 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, entertaining or even funny, 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. 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 Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about 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 is being said 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if left 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 brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative with an excess of positive material, 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business/brand name and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many businesses are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they ignore their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- 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 support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “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.
Do you have an effective strategy for managing your online reputation in the web economy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective user review management. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Predicting Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 (have you noticed how all 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 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part two we explore WordPress and social media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Tools – Part Two
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