The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve success in today’s connected digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your products, brand, and company.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest news around your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, spot market opportunities, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, assess competitor activity and mind share, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, topics, brands, or products.
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 a cross-section of groups that include marketing teams, market researchers, online reputation managers, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand so you can react to conversations and interact with online users in a timely manner.
In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content publishing 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 website 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 Part Two of this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social Media Networks 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, 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 content for various social networks.
The WordPress CMS platform is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Use this free plugin to set up and manage your own social networking community on your WordPress website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, 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 has an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking 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 Messaging
- 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.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels
Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to run most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that encourage users to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, 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 networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Social media measuring tools allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and business 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 those social networks.
Also, there are many apps and tools that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many of these tools will integrate with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Business Brand And Reputation
Building your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 and how you respond to users online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community finds out about it.
Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, it can also be very time-consuming.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site can help establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(You can automate web content syndication across social networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study The Influencers
Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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 media can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going 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 you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large and well-funded campaigns 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 the next section of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content. In this course we also explore many 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 Big Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard the term 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 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 tell 10 more people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if things go 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, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative with an excess of positive material, 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies all over the world are currently missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations.
Actively monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. Consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 enough good, positive things published online either to support the things you have listed in your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.
Do you have an effective strategy for managing your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Client Reviews
Tracking Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated 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 (have you noticed how all news sites 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 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 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 content that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In the next section we explore WordPress social media monitoring and tools. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Tracking Resources – Part Two
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)