The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page on your website about your company and services is not enough. To achieve business success in today’s connected global economy, you need to build a social community around your brand, company, and products and “listen”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, identify market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on the competition, and help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific businesses, products, topics, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, social signal monitoring 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 research, marketing professionals, digital reputation management companies, agencies, social engagement and community staff, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the active monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to track consumer behavior around their brands or products so they can respond to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media – A Guide For Business Owners
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress includes 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 networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friendship 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 contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking 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 Messaging
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing 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 share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read 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 channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Social tracking tools and applications 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 and tools that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many applications and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation 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 take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven site to automatically distribute your content across social networks.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you reverse engineer what experts and thought leaders in your niche are doing.
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 can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign 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 know your audience well, 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging 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. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard of 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 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 competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services 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 defeating the negative effects with positive material, 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 do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Companies everywhere are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond global brands, celebrities, and security agencies. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Managing online reputation is becoming more an important aspect of doing business online in the digital economy.
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Reviews Management For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what 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 get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 provides 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. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 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 site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part two we explore WordPress and social media monitoring. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media Tracking – Part 2
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