The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s interconnected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged social community around your company, brand, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give you direct access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your products, company, or brand on social media, spy on your competition, identify potential opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of campaigns, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by embittered customers. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
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, typically carried out by a cross-section of people including market research, marketing professionals, online reputation management (ORM) specialists, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to respond to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: WordPress And Small Business – The Complete Guide To Growing A Successful Business With A WordPress Blog
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to explore the full power of social media.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Products And Services 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, Pinterest 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.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Discussion Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is known 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 platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that encourage users to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 your web content on various social media networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social media measuring tools and services to discover what your audience wants, identify new trends and business 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 your social accounts.
Additionally, there are many applications and tools that let you survey customers online. Many tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions 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 the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress website to automate content syndication on social channels.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to observe and learn what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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 brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
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 out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big 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 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 many individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 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 this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative impact with an excess of 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 your name 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.
Companies are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not effectively monitoring their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. Being able to monitor the reputation of of average individuals is also important. Consider the scenarios 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 the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have a system in place for managing your online reputation in the online economy?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective user review management. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Management Of User Reviews
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, 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 and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Facebook, yesterday’s must-have new 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 (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 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part 2 we explore WordPress and media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking : Resources – Part Two
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