WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

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

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

Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, measure the impact of campaigns, and spot market opportunities. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, brands, topics, or businesses.

As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor conversations and social activity on social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including digital reputation specialists, market research, marketing teams, sales teams, social engagement and community staff, and agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately different technology providers have developed tools that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands allowing them to respond to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out.

Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and extremely easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too 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, go here: Using A WordPress Blog To Grow Your Small Business

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 is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Your Social 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.

WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• Extensible 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 has an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.

WPSymposium

(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking 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 Messaging
• Notifications
• Member Directory
• Groups
• Online Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels

With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools 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 run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that allow users to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across various social media channels with WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Use social measuring tools to listen to what your market wants, identify new opportunities and stay one step 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.

Additionally, many apps are available that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many applications will easily integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Business Brand And Online Reputation

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

You are trying to engage 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 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. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community finds out about it.

Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. 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 blog lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.

(Automatically distribute content across various social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress site.)

Study Authority Sites In Your Niche

Being able to listen in to social conversations 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 spend a lot of time nowadays 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 to explore new opportunities can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

Could Your Web Content “Go Viral”?

Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands and corporations have failed.

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 provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content. In this course we also discuss ways to create content that has 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management

You have probably heard the term 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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage 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 weakening the negative with an excess of positive material, 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 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.

Companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they ignore their digital reputations.

Monitoring conversations and posts on social media extends beyond global brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. There’s also the online reputation of individuals. Consider the following situations:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 support your job application.

Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.

Do you know what people are saying about you online?

We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. For more details, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress

Analyzing Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 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. Posting regular 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 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 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 Section 1

In part two we explore WordPress social media measurement tools. To continue reading, click here: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress – Part Two

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