The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a page on your site with static information about your company and services is no longer enough. To achieve success in today’s highly connected world, you need to build an engaged community around your brand, company, and products, based around “listening”.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, be alerted to disasters, spot market opportunities, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific businesses, topics, products, or brands.
As a tool for business intelligence, social media 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 online reputation management (ORM) companies, marketing teams, market researchers, social media marketing agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different service providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.
Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?
WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into the full power social media marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks 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 content for social networkign sites.
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-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
BuddyPress is a free WordPress plugin that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- Extensible User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Discussion 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network 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 Messages
- Notification Bar
- Member 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
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. 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 time and money.
If you want to manage 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 great plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication across social media networks using WordPress.
Market Research
Using social media measuring tools and services allows you to listen to what your market wants, identify new business opportunities and stay one step ahead of many 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.
Additionally, there are many tools that let you survey customers online. Many of these applications will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche
Building your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations to gain 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 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 very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when the online community gets hold of the news.
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 your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automatically distribute your content on various social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and even be inspired by what experts in your niche are doing right.
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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?
Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success 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 even funny, 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 an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss many 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 Global 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)
- Monitoring Online Trends
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 others are saying about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard the saying 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 stuff 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 image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative impact with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do this, 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 name and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Many companies around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not effectively monitoring their online reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. There’s also the online reputation of average individuals. Consider these 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 any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
Are you effectively ignoring your digital reputation?
We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective customer review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For User Feedback Management
Benefiting From Online Trends
Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 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 goes viral on Twitter, 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. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 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 1
In part two we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement resources. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: 25+ Media Tools That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part 2
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