The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a page on your website with static information about your business is not enough. To succeed in today’s highly connected global and digital world, you need to build and nurture a social community around your products, company, and brand and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your target audience and give you immediate access to the latest information around your products or services.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competition, be alerted to crises, measure the impact of campaigns, and identify market opportunities. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, brands, businesses, or topics.
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 people including digital reputation management (ORM) companies, marketing teams, market research, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.
Fortunately different providers have made available tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their brands or products allowing them to respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and really easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.
To learn more about why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Using WordPress To Grow A Successful Business
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 business marketing opportunities.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider 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 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-featured social network site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)
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 Messages
- 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.
WPSymposium Pro
(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- Member Directory
- Groups
- 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 Multiple Social Channels
With most social media platforms, syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to drive most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on various social networks with WordPress.
Social Media – Great For Market Research
Use social tools and applications to listen to what your target audience wants, identify trends and new opportunities and stay one step ahead of your competition.
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, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.
Build And Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand Online
Strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, 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 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 stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community gets hold of the news.
Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, 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 visitors to your business.
(An expertly configured WordPress site lets you automatically syndicate content on various social media networks.)
Know What Your Competition Is Doing
Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities and thought leaders 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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
What About “Going Viral”?
Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, 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 Part Two of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.
We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, 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
- Online Trend Monitoring
Managing Your Digital Reputation
You have probably heard of 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 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 tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.
Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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/brand and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies all around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they ignore their digital reputations.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security departments. There’s also the reputation of average individuals. Consider the following scenarios:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody proceedings 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, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.
How good is your reputation online?
We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress
Online Trend Monitoring
Regardless of which 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 announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 topical 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 other people will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In the next section we explore WordPress social media monitoring and useful tools. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Social Monitoring Tools – Part 2
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