The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected digital economy, you need to grow and nurture an engaged social community around your company, brand, and services, all based around ”listening” to their needs and feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest information about your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or services on social media, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, measure the impact of campaigns, spot market opportunities, and spy on the competition. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, products, topics, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, the ability to track online conversations and social activity on social media 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 people including PR companies, marketing professionals, market research, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately many providers have created affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track consumer behavior around their brands so they can react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools that are worth knowing about.
What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and really easy to use CMS 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 the vehicle that can help your small business grow and succeed online, see this article: The Business Owner’s Guide To Understanding WordPress
Using some of the tools listed here 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 is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free plugin allows you to set up a social network on your website.
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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium 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 Messages
- Notifications
- User Directory
- Groups
- Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add social features to pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to manage most of 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 users to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on various social media channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Use social marketing tools and applications to discover what consumers want, identify new 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 and tools that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand
Building your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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 horror 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 can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, it can also be extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress website to automate your content syndication across various social networks.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what the experts are doing right.
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 potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral”?
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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations have failed dismally.
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 “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also explore ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more info, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). 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 it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, 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 diminishing the negative effects with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not effectively monitoring their digital reputations.
Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of average individuals. For example, consider these situations:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings is feeling 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, 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 deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Online reputation management should not be ignored if you want your business to grow.
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective user review management. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 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 post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful resources for tracking social activities. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Measurement Resources For WordPress Users – Part 2
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