The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected digital economy, you need to grow, nurture and engage with a community around your services, company, and brand and “listen”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz about your products or services.
Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, products, or company on social media, avert disasters, measure the impact of campaigns, spot potential market opportunities, and spy on the competition. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, topics, products, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, social media signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include marketing professionals, digital reputation management (ORM) specialists, market research, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and agencies. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different providers have made available affordable tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track what consumers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about their brands allowing them to react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and very easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your business grow online, see this article: Understanding WordPress – The Business Owner’s Guide
Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into the new social business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing 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, 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 content for various 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 networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network 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:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium Pro 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
- Notifications
- 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 Social Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your 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 content syndication on social media networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Social marketing tools allow you to discover what consumers want, identify new opportunities and stay ahead of your competition.
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.
Additionally, there are tools that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Brand And Online Reputation
Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, 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. 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses 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 extremely time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute your web content on various social channels with an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and and perhaps also be inspired by the success strategies of experts and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Going Viral” Online Faster
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 campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands 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, informative 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content. In this free course we also explore ways to create content that has 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 – 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
- Tracking Online Trends
Managing Your Online Reputation
You have probably heard of online reputation management. 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 more people about it. People or competitors 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 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 diminishing the negative effects with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 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 person directly, etc.
Companies are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not effectively monitoring their digital reputations.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of individuals is also important. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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 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 any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
Online reputation management is a vital aspect of doing business online in the digital economy.
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective user review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Predicting Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate 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 publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 (have you noticed how all 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 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 an authoritative destination or resource for your niche or industry. People may 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 other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In the next section we explore great social media measurement resources for business owners. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: 29 Media Resources For WordPress Users – Part 2
***
"I was absolutely amazed at the scope and breadth of these tutorials! The most in-depth training I have ever received on any subject!" - Myke O'Neill, DailyGreenPost.com