The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected global and digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a social community around your brand, company, and services.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest information about your products or services.
Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, identify new opportunities for engagement, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by online users, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.
As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor volume and sentiments of social conversations and activity on social media channels like blogs, internet forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., discussion groups, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include PR staff, market research, marketing teams, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately various providers have created tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.
In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
WordPress And Social Media Marketing – A Guide For Website Owners
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use content management 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 using the WordPress software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, 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 to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress
WordPress comes with built-in social features, like interactive 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 content management system (CMS) is not only great 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
(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:
- Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messaging
- 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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium
(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notifications
- Member 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.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.
If you want to drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication across social networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market
Using social media tools allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay 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 accounts.
Additionally, there are applications and tools that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Brand And Credibility And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a robust 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 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 and how you respond to users online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. 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 site can help establish your your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.
(Automate your web content syndication across various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and and maybe even reverse engineer what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.
Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.
It’s no secret that recruitment companies research social media 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 grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.
“Go Viral” Faster
Many 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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands and corporations have failed.
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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small
(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 (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 if what is being posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses 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 with positive content, 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business 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 are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring conversations and new conversations on social media extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the scenarios below:
- A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 help your case.
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 the situation in a timely manner.
Are you 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 business through effective customer review management. Visit this page for more information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Management Of User Feedback
Understanding Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on social media, 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 and new content ideas (how many news media channels 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore social media measurement tools every WordPress user should become familiar with. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Tools For Social Media Tracking – Part 2
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)