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 not enough. To succeed in today’s highly connected world, you need to build and engage with a community around your company, brand, and products, based around “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate 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 brand, services, or company on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of campaigns, and help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, brands, products, or topics.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to track 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 groups that include marketing professionals, market researchers, online reputation management (ORM) specialists, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many providers have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what consumers are saying about their brands allowing them to react to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and really easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your business grow and succeed online, see this article: The Business Owner’s Guide To WordPress
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social Media 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, Pinterest and many others.
For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for 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 network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free plugin helps you run a social networking community on your WordPress site.
BuddyPress is known 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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- Member Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to posts and pages using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools 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 drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that allow users to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, 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 automatically syndicate your web content on various social media networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Social media tools and applications allow you to listen to what your audience wants, 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 networking sites.
Also, there are applications that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Reputation And Brand And Showcase Your Talent
Building your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a 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 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated 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 site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you automatically distribute your web content across various social channels.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you observe and discover what the experts are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.
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 “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in the next section of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this course we also explore ways to create content with 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 Businesses)
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 about 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 it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors 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 public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your 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 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 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 yourself 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 website or person directly, etc.
Many companies are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of individuals. For example, consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
How well do you manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. More information: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Tracking 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 get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 (have you noticed how all 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 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore WordPress tools for social media measurement. To read more, click on this link: Media Tracking Resources For Business Owners – Part Two
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