The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a web page with static information. To succeed in today’s interconnected global economy, you need to build and nurture an engaged community around your services, company, and brand, based around actively “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give you direct access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or products on social media, be alerted to crises, spot opportunities for engagement, spy on your competitors, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, businesses, brands, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor volume and sentiments of social conversations and activity on social media channels like blogging, forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms, message boards, video sites, and user-generated content 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 people including market researchers, marketing teams, digital reputation specialists, social engagement and community staff, sales teams, and agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track what is being said online about your brand or products allowing you to react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use 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 using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of 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 for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networks.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- 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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to drive most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication across various social media networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Using social tools and applications allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new opportunities and stay one step ahead of many 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.
Additionally, there are many tools that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a solid 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 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 stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog can automatically syndicate your content on social media channels.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.
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, 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore 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 Global Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
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 it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other 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 left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting 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 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 can help you. If you Google yourself 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 address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring conversations and new conversations on social media extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also important. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective strategy to manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. More information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Customer Reviews Management
Benefiting From Online Trends
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 announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral 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 (have you noticed how all 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 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 site or business 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 Section 1
In part 2 we explore 25+ social media tracking resources for WordPress users. To keep reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Monitoring : Useful Tools – Part Two
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