The days of passively 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 an engaged community around your company, brand, and services.
Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you direct access to the latest buzz about your services or products.
Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or products on social media, be alerted to crises, spot potential opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of campaigns, and spy on the competition. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, businesses, brands, or products.
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 various people including market researchers, PR companies, marketing teams, sales teams, social media marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.
Fortunately different technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a wide range of social media channels, allowing companies to track what is being said online about their products or brands so they can react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.
In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about.
WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing
WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it 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 the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, see this article: Understanding WordPress – The Small Business Owner’s Guide
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 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 images 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 completely transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.
BuddyPress
(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)
Use the BuddyPress WordPress plugin to set up and manage your own social networking community on WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more.
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.
WPSymposium Pro
(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)
WP Symposium provides 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
- 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.
Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels
With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of 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 a number of plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication on social networks with WordPress.
Conduct Market Research
Use social tracking tools to discover what your market wants, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay 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 those social networks.
Also, many apps are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.
Build Your Business Reputation And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry
Building your business reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication and a robust social marketing strategy.
You are trying to engage with real people, 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions 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 paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.
Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.
An expertly configured WordPress website can help establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.
(You can automatically syndicate content across various social networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)
Spy On Authorities In Your Niche
Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer the success strategies of experts 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 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 channels can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.
Could Your Web Content “Go 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 clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands 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 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 an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:
Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses
(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses)
Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Online Trend Monitoring
Online Reputation Management
You have probably heard about online reputation management (ORM). 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 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things 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 work of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.
If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.
Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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 your name or your business/brand name and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.
Many companies are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.
Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:
- A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 support your job application.
Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, 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 negative reviews about your business through effective customer review management. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing User Reviews
Analyzing Online Trends
Regardless of what 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 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 becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 provides 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 topical 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 an authoritative 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 information that other online users will write about and post in their content.
This is the end of Part One
In part 2 we explore top social media monitoring tools for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Measurement Resources For WordPress – Part 2
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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