The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your brand, company, and products.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news about your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, identify market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a tool for business intelligence, 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 people including PR companies, marketing professionals, market research, social media marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately various technology companies have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a wide range of social media channels, allowing companies to track what is being said online about their brands or products allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc.
WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform
WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very easy to use CMS 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 the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Using WordPress – A Business Owner’s Guide
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 business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is an ideal platform for marketing 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.
The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, 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:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)
WP Symposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Messages
- Notifications
- 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels
Many social media platforms 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 manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 various social media channels using WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Social media tools and applications allow you to discover what consumers want, 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 your social networking sites.
Also, there are many applications and tools that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many applications and tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Credibility And Showcase Your Talent
Building and strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on 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 situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress blog can help establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress website lets you automatically distribute content across social media networks.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to reverse engineer what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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 channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Going Viral” Faster
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 are out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget 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 will find so useful, engaging, entertaining or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could 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 compelling content. In this course we also discuss ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more information, 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 activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Monitoring Online Trends
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the work of PR 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 diminishing the negative effects with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you from spreading further, 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 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 website or person directly, etc.
Many companies are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. Consider these scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 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, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective user review management. See this page to learn more: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Client Reviews Management
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new 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 information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (how many news sites 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 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 other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Section One
In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful social monitoring tools. To keep reading, click on this link: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Resources – Part 2
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