The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to put up a web page with static information. To achieve business success in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to build a social community around your products, brand, and company, based around “listening”.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest information around your services or products.
Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, spot market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, and assess competitor activity and market dominance. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, products, topics, 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, typically carried out by a cross-section of groups that include marketing professionals, market researchers, PR companies, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various service providers have made available tools to facilitate the monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what consumers are saying about their brands or products allowing them 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 – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only 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 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: Understanding WordPress – The Small Business Owner’s Guide
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friend 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.
WP Symposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro 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
- User Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are 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 a considerable amount of time and money.
If you want to run 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 encourage users to share your content online 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 content syndication on social media using WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social media tracking tools and applications allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and business 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 networking sites.
Additionally, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Credibility And Brand Online
Building and strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, 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 comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community finds out about it.
Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. 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-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.
(Automate your content syndication on various social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress site.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that 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 channels can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large and well-funded campaigns have failed.
In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, 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 Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content that has 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 Global Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital 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 is being said about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. 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 material online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative impact 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 can help you. If you Google yourself or your business/brand name and spot a negative comment or bad review, 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 grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.
Actively monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of an average individual. Consider these scenarios:
- 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 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, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.
How are you managing your online reputation in the digital economy?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective customer review management. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress
Tracking Online Trends
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 promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 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 additional 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 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 monitoring. To keep reading, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Monitoring Tools – Part Two
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