The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your company is not enough. To achieve success in today’s interconnected global economy, you need to build a community around your company, brand, and services, based around “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and market dominance, measure the impact of campaigns, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, and identify opportunities for engagement. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, products, topics, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, social media signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of people including market research, PR staff, marketing teams, agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately a number of providers have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track what consumers are saying about their brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Media Management Tools
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow 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, see this article: WordPress – A Business Owner’s Guide
Using some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the full power of marketing your business on social media.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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, Pinterest 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 social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to run a social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, 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 an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- Member 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 Many Channels
Many social media tools 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 drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that allow users to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication on social networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social media marketing tools and applications to discover what consumers want, identify 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 accounts.
Also, there are applications that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many apps can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on 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 online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Automate your web content syndication on various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media allows you to reverse engineer what the experts are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing 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 study and research your audience, 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 Part Two of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many ways to create content that has 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 – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
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 if what is being said 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 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses 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 reducing 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 spot 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 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 person directly, etc.
Companies all around the world are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of individuals is also important. For example, consider the following situations:
- 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 enough 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” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How well do you manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting 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 information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 and new content ideas (how many news media channels now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 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 others 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 : Useful Tools For Measuring Social Metrics – Part Two
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum