WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

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

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your target audience and give you instant access to the latest news about your services or products.

Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, products, or brand on social media, spot potential opportunities for engagement, avert disasters, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on the competition. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, businesses, topics, or brands.

As a tool for business intelligence, social signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including marketing professionals, market research, online reputation management (ORM) specialists, professional sales reps, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.

Fortunately different providers have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to track consumer behavior around their brands so they can react to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.

Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and extremely 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the new social business 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, Pinterest 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 networks.

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 networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Run your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• Extended Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• Extensible User Groups
• Friendship Connections
• Online 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WP Symposium

(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messages
• Notifications
• Directory
• Groups
• Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels

With most social media tools, syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.

If you want to manage 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 allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content across social networks using WordPress.

Market Research

Use social media measuring tools and services to listen to what your audience wants, identify new trends and 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 and tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many applications will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Credibility And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise

Strengthening your brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.

You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.

Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.

An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.

(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site can automate content syndication across social media channels.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to discover and and perhaps also reverse engineer 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 name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

Could Your Content Be The Next Online Viral Sensation?

Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands and corporations have failed dismally.

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

We provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also discuss 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 – Not Just For Big Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management

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 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 companies could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies and individuals online.

If you or your image, good 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 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 can help you. If you Google your name or your business and spot a negative comment or review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Many businesses are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the following situations:

• 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, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

Do you have an digital reputation management strategy in place for your business?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users

Benefiting From Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets 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 Twitter, 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 broadcasters 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 a “go to” 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 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 Section 1

In part two we explore WordPress and social media and useful tools for monitoring social activities. To continue reading this article, click here: Top Media Tracking Tools That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part 2

***