The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page on your website about your company is not enough. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged social community around your company, brand, and products.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest buzz around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, assess competitor activity and market share, identify opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific topics, products, businesses, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, 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 various groups that include market researchers, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, marketing teams, social marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately a number of service providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your products or brand allowing you to respond to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and very easy to use CMS 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.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your business grow and succeed online, go here: How To Grow Your Small Business Using WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience 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, YouTube 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 social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform 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 plugin for WordPress 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
- Friend Connections
- Discussion Forums
- Notifications
- Many Add-On Features
BuddyPress is known 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 open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members 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 features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
Many social media platforms 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 run most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your web content across various social media channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Social tools and services allow you to listen to what your audience wants, 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 those social networks.
Also, there are many tools that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Credibility And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear 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.
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, but it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress blog can automatically syndicate content on various social media channels.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content Be The Next Viral “Hit”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “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 marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, engaging, informative or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create 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 explore many ways to create content with 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing about 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 others are saying 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 will tell 10 other people about it. People or competing companies 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 now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative with 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 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 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.
Businesses all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of individuals is also important. Consider the scenarios below:
- 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 support the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. More information: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on social media, 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 (how many news sites 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part two we explore social media tracking tools that can help grow your business online. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: 29 Social Media Tracking Tools For WordPress – Part Two
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