The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected global and digital economy, you need to grow and nurture an engaged social community around your brand, services, and company, based around actively “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give you direct access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or products on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on your competitors, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, and spot potential opportunities for engagement. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, social media monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including digital reputation management (ORM) companies, marketing teams, market researchers, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various providers have made available tools and solutions that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track what consumers are saying about your products or brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and very easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 you achieve your business goals online, go here: Using WordPress To Grow Your Business Online
Using some of the tools listed in this article 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Social Media With WordPress
WordPress includes 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 article titles and descriptions for social networks.
WordPress 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 plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
This free WordPress plugin allows you to set up a social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.
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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- User Directory
- Groups
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating content has never been easier. There are tools and services 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 most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 web content syndication on various social channels using WordPress.
Market Research
Social measuring tools allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new 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 your social accounts.
Also, many apps are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these applications can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility Online And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 comments and discussions online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. 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 take up a lot of your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Use an expertly configured WordPress blog to automatically syndicate your web content on various social networks.)
Spy On Your Competition
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and and maybe even be inspired by the success strategies of experts and influencers 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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
“Go Viral” Online Faster
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “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 advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget 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, 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 have created a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this course we also explore ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about 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 is being said 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 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 companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative impact 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 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 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.
Many businesses around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of individuals 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Do you know what users are saying about you online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Management Of Customer Feedback
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news media outlets now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)
Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical content with your 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 site or brand 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 1
In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful tools for tracking social performance. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking : Useful Tools – Part Two
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