The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a web page with static information. To achieve business success in today’s connected digital economy, you need to build and engage with a social community around your services, brand, and company and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.
Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest information about your services or products.
Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, products, or brand on social media, spy on the competition, identify new market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, and take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, businesses, topics, or products.
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 various groups that include market research, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, marketing teams, social media marketing agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.
Fortunately various service providers have created many affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out.
Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and really easy to use CMS 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 WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.
Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress
WordPress includes 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.
WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Set up your own social networking site 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:
- Extended Member Profiles
- Activity Streams
- Private Messages
- User Groups
- Friend Connections
- Online 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
(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)
WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for users who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:
- Friends
- Activity Wall
- Private Mail
- Notification Bar
- Directory
- Groups
- Online Forum
- Photo Galleries
- Chat
- RSS Feeds
WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your pages and posts using shortcodes.
Share Your Content Across Many Channels
With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.
If you want to drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, 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 across social channels with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Using social tools allows you to discover what your audience wants, identify new opportunities and stay 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.
Additionally, there are many apps that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many apps can be integrated with WordPress.
Build Your Business Brand And Reputation And Showcase Your Talent
Strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 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 or customer complaint poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automatically distribute your web content across social media with an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Study Authority Sites In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and discover the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.
Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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 name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new 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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands and corporations have failed dismally.
In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, informative or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.
Some of the tools listed in the next section 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 shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Large Brands
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)
In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Tracking Online Trends
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
You have probably heard about 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 high profile and even general 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 will tell 10 more people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff 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 public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can do anything, 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 review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.
Companies are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. Consider the following 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 a lot of 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.
Do you know what customers are saying about your business online?
We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users
Analyzing Online Trends
Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 (have you noticed how all news media agencies 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and mention in their content.
This is the end of Part 1
In part 2 we explore best social media monitoring tools for WordPress. To keep reading this article, click on this link: Media Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part Two
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now