The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your business and services is no longer enough. To achieve business success in today’s connected world, you need to build and nurture a community around your services, company, and brand, all based around ”listening” to their needs and feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give you instant access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, identify new opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on your competition, and avert crises. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, 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 various groups that include online reputation management companies, marketing professionals, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, sales teams, and social marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately many service providers have made available a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can react to conversations and interact with online users in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – Social Management Tools & Applications
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and extremely easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 content for social networks.
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-blown social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Run your own social community on WordPress, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, 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.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple 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 strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content across social media channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social media monitoring tools allows you to listen to what your audience wants, identify 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.
Also, many tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 to comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up paying a heavy price when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, 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 helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automate your content syndication across various social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies research 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 channels can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “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 advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns have failed.
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 meaningful and compelling content. In this free course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about online reputation management. 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 if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. People or competitors 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 public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses 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 diminishing the negative with an excess of positive material, 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/brand name and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses everywhere are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support the things you have listed in 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 does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Online reputation management is becoming more important in the online economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 (how many news media broadcasters 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 additional 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 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 Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful tools for monitoring social indicators. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress – Part Two
***
"I love the way your email series "Infinite Web Content Creation Training Series" is documented and presented. It is very absorbing and captivating. The links and tutorials are interesting and educational. This has motivated me to rewrite my content following the concepts I am learning from the email series." - Mani Raju, www.fortuneinewaste.com