WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected global and digital economy, you need to grow, nurture and engage with a social community around your company, products, and brand, based around actively “listening”.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news about your products or services.

Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, identify market opportunities, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, assess competitor activity and mind share, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, brands, topics, or businesses.

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 groups that include market research, online reputation managers, marketing professionals, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately different technology companies have developed affordable tools that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your products or brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.

In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.

WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media

WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage 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 the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.

Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 networks.

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

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

This free WordPress plugin allows you to run your own social community on your WordPress website.

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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium Pro

(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

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

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

Share Your Content Across Many Channels

Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.

If you want to run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content on various social channels using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Social media tools and applications allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and 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 your social networking sites.

Additionally, there are applications that let you survey customers online. Many of these tools will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Credibility And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent

Building and strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a robust social marketing strategy.

You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, 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 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 very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community finds out about it.

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, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be very demanding on your time.

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

(You can automatically distribute your content on social channels with an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)

Spy On Authorities In Your Niche

Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and learn what experts and leaders in your niche are doing.

Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time researching social media and studying the 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 new lucrative ventures.

What About “Going Viral” Online?

Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large and well-funded campaigns 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, engaging, entertaining or even funny, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many ways to create content that has 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 Large Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Monitoring Online Trends

Managing Your Digital Reputation

You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). 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 it said before 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 businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the work of PR 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 diminishing the negative with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do this, 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 spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Companies around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.

Monitoring online conversations extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody battle 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 an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.

Managing your digital reputation should not be avoided if you want your business to grow.

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective customer review management. Go here to learn more: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management For WordPress

Tracking Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you are 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 release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

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

This is the end of Part 1

In the next section we explore WordPress resources and media tracking. To read more, click here: WordPress Tools: Social Media Measurement – Part 2

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