WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your services, company, and brand.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give you immediate access to the latest news around your products or services.

Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users, spy on your competitors, and spot new opportunities for engagement. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.

As a business intelligence tool, social media signal 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 marketing teams, PR companies, market research, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.

Fortunately various technology companies have developed tools that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify and even predict what consumers are saying about their products or brands allowing them to react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.

In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.

What Makes WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?

WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your small business grow and succeed online, go here: How To Grow Your Business Using WordPress

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 to market your business on social media.

Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience 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, 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 various social networkign sites.

The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Set up your own social networking site 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:

• Extended Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• User Groups
• Friendship 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 an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium Pro

(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)

WPSymposium provides a strong support community and assistance for members who need professional help. Social features of the plugin include:

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notification Bar
• Directory
• Groups
• Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to posts and pages using shortcodes.

Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels

Many social media tools 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 most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many plugins that encourage users to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across social media with WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Using social monitoring tools allows you to discover what your target audience wants, identify new 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 those social networks.

Also, there are many tools that let you run surveys online. Many tools will integrate with WordPress.

Build And Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand Online

Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.

You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets exposed 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 be extremely time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.

(You can automatically distribute content on various social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress site.)

Spy On Your Competition

Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to observe and learn what the experts 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

“Go Viral” Faster

Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing 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 become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.

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, engaging, 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Global Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)

Social media monitoring activities can be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management
• Tracking Online Trends

Managing Your Online Reputation

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 others are saying about them online – especially if what is being said 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 things online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, 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 diluting the negative with an excess of positive content, 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 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 name 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.

Many companies are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their online reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of individuals. Consider these scenarios:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.

Are you effectively managing your online reputation?

We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage customer reviews. More information: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content (how many news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 others will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In the next section we explore WordPress social media tracking and useful resources. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media Monitoring – Part 2

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