The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s interconnected digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your brand, products, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz around your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, identify new opportunities for engagement, assess competitor activity and market share, be alerted to crises, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, social signal 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 digital reputation managers, market researchers, marketing professionals, social engagement and community personnel, professional sales reps, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately many providers have created a range of tools that facilitate the monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about your brand so you can react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content management 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.
To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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 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.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers 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, 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 various social networks.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- 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 regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messaging
- Notifications
- 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 Multiple Channels
With most social media tools, syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to run most of your social marketing 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 web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication on social channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Using social monitoring tools allows you to discover what your target audience wants, identify new business opportunities and stay 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 those social networks.
Also, there are many apps that let you survey customers online. Many of these apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility Online And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
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 be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress website can automate your web content syndication on various social media channels.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and learn the success strategies of authorities and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
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 are outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large and well-funded campaigns 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, compelling, 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 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 compelling content. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, 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
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard the term 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 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 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now 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 impact with positive content, 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 your name or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. Being able to monitor the 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 enough 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 anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective strategy to manage your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage user reviews. To learn more, go here: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business 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 say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, 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 (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 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 website or business 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 Part One
In part two we explore media tracking resources that can help grow your business online. To continue reading this article, click here: 25+ Media Resources For Business Owners – Part Two
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