The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s connected world, you need to build and engage with a social community around your brand, company, and products, all based around ”listening” to their needs and feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or products on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, spot opportunities for engagement, be alerted to crises, and spy on your competition. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, products, brands, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, being able to track activity on social media channels like blogging, internet forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, discussion boards, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include market research, online reputation specialists, marketing professionals, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various service providers have made available a range of tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to track consumer behavior around their brands or products allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not just 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 platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with 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, 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 social networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium 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
- 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 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 run most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that encourage users to 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 automate content syndication on various social media networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social measuring tools and services allow you to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new opportunities and stay 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 your social networking sites.
Additionally, there are many applications and tools that let you run surveys online. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand Online
Building your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of 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 very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute your content on social channels with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen to social conversations can help you observe and discover what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing.
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. Using social media to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, entertaining or even funny, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also discuss ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global 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 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 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative effects with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Businesses around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. Consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings feels 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 an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
How are you managing your online 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 business, products or services through effective user review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Client Feedback Management
Online Trend Monitoring
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 promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news media channels 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 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 content that other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media tracking. To continue reading, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Resources – Part 2
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