The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a page on your site with static information about your business or services is not enough. To achieve success in today’s highly connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your company, brand, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest news about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, and avert impending crises. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, businesses, brands, or products.
As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor social activity on social media channels like blogs, forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, etc., discussion groups, video/photo sharing websites, 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 a cross-section of groups that include marketing teams, PR agencies, market research, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately many technology providers have developed many tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their brands or products so they can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to use CMS 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.
To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to explore the full power of 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.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks 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 networks.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need 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 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 drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that encourage users to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content across social media channels with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social monitoring tools and services to listen to what your audience wants, identify new 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 those social networks.
Also, there are apps that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations for 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be very demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate your web content across social channels with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and discover what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
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. Connecting with others through social channels can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
Could Your Content “Go Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.
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 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 provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content that has 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about 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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. 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 stuff online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses 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 with an excess of 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 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business/brand name and a negative comment or 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 increase their revenues because they are not monitoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. Being able to monitor the reputation of of average individuals is also very important. For example, consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Managing digital reputation is important in the digital economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy User Feedback Management
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps 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 videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, 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 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 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 site or brand 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 the next section we explore 25+ social media monitoring resources for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now