The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your business is no longer enough. To achieve success in today’s highly connected global and digital world, you need to build and nurture a community around your services, brand, and company and ”listen” to what they have to say.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give you immediate access to the latest information about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on your competitors, and avert disasters. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including market researchers, online reputation management (ORM) companies, marketing teams, professional sales reps, social engagement and community personnel, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology providers have developed tools to facilitate the active tracking of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to identify what consumers are saying about your brand so you can react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content management 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.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: Everything You Need To Know About Growing Your Small Business Online With WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in the next section 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 is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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, 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 various social networkign sites.
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
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
Set up your own online social networking community on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
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 makes available a number of great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your content on various social media networks using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social tools and applications to listen to what consumers want, 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 your social network pages.
Also, there are many apps that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these applications and tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Credibility And Brand
Strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community finds out about it.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automatically distribute your content on various social networks using an expertly configured WordPress blog.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you discover and even be inspired by the success strategies of authorities and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies research social media 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 increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many 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 outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large 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 in your audience 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 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 a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also explore many 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
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 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative effects with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Businesses are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-related agencies. Being able to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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” alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
How well do you manage your online reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business through effective customer review management. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management For WordPress
Tracking Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 (have you noticed how all news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical content with added 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 could 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 other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part two we explore WordPress and social media and useful social monitoring resources. To continue reading this article, click here: Best Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)