The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page about your company and services is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to grow and nurture a social community around your brand, company, and products and “listen”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you instant access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, products, or brand on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, be alerted to disasters, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to track conversations and activity on social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of people including marketing professionals, market researchers, online reputation management (ORM) agencies, social marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various service providers have made available a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify what customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about your brand allowing you to react to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
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 application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
Using some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social 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, YouTube 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 various 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-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site 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:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friendship 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Directory
- Groups
- 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 Social Channels
Many social media platforms 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 manage 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 many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, 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 automate web content syndication on social media networks with WordPress.
Market Research
Using social marketing tools and applications allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new opportunities and stay one step ahead of your competition.
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 pages.
Additionally, there are tools that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Business Brand And Online Reputation
Building and strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automatically syndicate your web content across various social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to reverse engineer what experts in your niche are doing right.
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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral”?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content that has 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 – Not Just For Large Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative effects 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 can help you. If you Google your name 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 around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of average individuals is also important. Consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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 an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective system in place to manage your online reputation in the web economy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective customer review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which 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 publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact 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 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. Posting regular 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part two we explore social media measurement tools for WordPress users. To keep reading, click on this link: WordPress Resources For Social Media Tracking – Part 2
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