The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected global economy, you need to build a community around your services, brand, and company, based around actively ”listening” to their feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give you instant access to the latest information about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or services on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of campaigns, be alerted to crises, and identify opportunities for engagement. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, products, topics, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social media channels like blogging, forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms, message 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, often carried out by various people including marketing teams, market research, PR staff, professional sales reps, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology providers have developed affordable tools to facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands allowing them to react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – A Guide For Website Owners
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your business succeed online, go here: WordPress For Small Business Owners – A Beginner’s Guide To Building A Successful Small Business With A WordPress Blog
Using some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the full power of marketing your business on social media.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social Media Networks 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, 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 social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run 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:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- User Groups
- Friend 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium Pro 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 Messaging
- Notifications
- 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple 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 many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication across social media networks using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Social monitoring tools allow you to discover what your target audience wants, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step 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 network pages.
Also, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications and tools can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand
Strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 and how you respond to users online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress website can automatically syndicate content across various social channels.)
Study Niche Authorities
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer what the experts are doing.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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 increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Go Viral” Faster
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large 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 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 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 will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also discuss 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 Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital 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 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 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 left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative impact with an excess of 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 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 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.
Many businesses are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you know what visitors are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. More info: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 (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 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 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 site or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social tracking resources. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress – Part Two
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