The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s highly connected digital economy, you need to build an engaged community around your services, company, and brand and ”listen” to what they have to say.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give you instant access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your products, brand, or company on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, spot opportunities for engagement, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, topics, brands, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring 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 teams, online reputation management (ORM) companies, sales teams, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately different providers have made available a range of tools that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to track what consumers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their products or brands so they can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, go here: How To Grow Your Business With WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
This plugin can be used to set up a social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, 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 an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking 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
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating 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 most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many great plugins that encourage users to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on social media channels using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tools and applications to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay one step 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.
Additionally, many apps and tools are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Reputation And Brand Online
Building your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a robust 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 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 comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate content on various social networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and and perhaps also be inspired by what the experts are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands and corporations have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, entertaining 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. 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 information, 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)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term 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 many 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 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 brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 defeating the negative with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 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.
Many companies are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they ignore their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, and security departments. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 it in a timely manner.
Are you effectively ignoring your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective user review management. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Reviews Management For WordPress
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate 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, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 (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 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 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 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 One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement resources. To read more, click on this link: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Monitoring Tools – Part Two
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