The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected world, you need to build and engage with a social community around your services, company, and brand, based around actively ”listening” to their feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give you instant 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 products, company, or brand on social media, avert crises, spot potential market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, topics, products, or brands.
As a business intelligence tool, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include PR staff, marketing professionals, market research, sales teams, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology companies have developed a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict what is being said online about your brand so you can react to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that you may want to check out.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application for growing your online presence in the social realm.
For an overview of why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: Everything You Need To Know To Grow A Successful Small Business Online With WordPress
Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To The Right 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run 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 Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friendship 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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online 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 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 media campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.
If you want to run your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow users to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your web content across social media channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Using social measuring tools and applications allows you to discover what your target audience wants, 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 applications that let you run surveys online. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Reputation And Brand
Building and strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, 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 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 other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, it can also take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you build authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress site to automatically syndicate content across social media.)
Study Influencers In Your Niche
Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to observe and discover the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies research social media 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.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?
Many 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 dollars at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large 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 will find so useful, compelling, entertaining 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore 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 Brands)
Social media monitoring can generally be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Online 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 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 tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative impact with an excess of 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 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 find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many businesses all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring online conversations extends beyond global brands, celebrities, and security-related departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also important. 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 help your case.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective strategy for managing your online reputation in the web economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective customer review management. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which 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 announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, 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 must-have new 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 (have you noticed how all news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social tracking tools. To continue reading this article, click on this link: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Resources – Part Two
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie