The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page about your business and services is not enough. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your company, brand, and products.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or products on social media, avert disasters, assess competitor activity, measure the impact of campaigns, and spot opportunities for engagement. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social activity, trends, and volume and sentiments of social conversations on social media channels like blogs, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, etc., message boards, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including market researchers, marketing professionals, digital reputation managers, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about their brands or products so they can react to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage 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.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the new social business 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.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Set up a social network on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.
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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content on social channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Use social media tools and services to discover what your market wants, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step 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 networking sites.
Additionally, many apps are available that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand Online
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, 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 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 comments and discussions 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 being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed 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 blog lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automate your web content syndication on various social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and even be inspired by what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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 increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally 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, engaging, informative or even funny, 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 a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content. In this free 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 – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. 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 competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative effects with 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 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 yourself or your business 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 companies all over the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively managing their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, and security-related departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. Consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective strategy for managing your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin 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 – User 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 promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on social media, 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 and new content ideas (how many 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 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 information that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore media measurement resources for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Tools – Part Two
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