The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected digital economy, you need to build and nurture a social community around your company, brand, and services, based around actively “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you instant access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or products on social media, be alerted to disasters, measure the impact of campaigns, identify new opportunities for engagement, and spy on your competition. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific businesses, products, brands, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor social media channels like blogging, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., 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 groups that include online reputation management companies, market researchers, marketing teams, sales teams, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed affordable tools that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what consumers are saying about their brands or products so they can react to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and extremely easy to use content management 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 why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: How To Grow Your Business Using WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in 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 provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship Connections
- Online 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
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notification Bar
- 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
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 makes available many plugins that allow users to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication across social networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social media tracking tools and services to listen to what your market wants, identify trends and new business 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.
Also, many applications and tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many applications and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site can automate your web content syndication across social networks.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to discover and and maybe also be inspired by the success strategies of experts and thought leaders in your niche.
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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget 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, compelling, entertaining 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard of 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 is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies 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 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 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 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.
Many businesses everywhere are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively managing their online reputations.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following situations:
- 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Are you effectively ignoring your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Management Of Customer Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, 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, 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 and new content ideas (how many news media broadcasters 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 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 information that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore WordPress resources and social media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Tools For Social Media Measurement – Part Two
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