WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to build and engage with a community around your company, brand, and services and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.

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

Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, identify opportunities for engagement, spy on your competitors, and measure the impact of campaigns. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.

As a tool for business intelligence, social media 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, marketing teams, digital reputation specialists, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately a number of service providers have developed many affordable tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to identify what is being said online about their products or brands so they can react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.

In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.

Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media

WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content management 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 the benefits of using the WordPress website management software please see our related posts section.

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 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, 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 ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

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

Run a social network on your website.

BuddyPress is known 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 plugins that greatly extend the application.

WPSymposium Pro

(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)

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

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

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

Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels

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

If you want to drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, 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 web content syndication across social networks using WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Use social media monitoring tools to listen to what your target audience wants, identify new trends and opportunities and stay 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 apps and tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications can be integrated with WordPress.

Build Your Reputation And Brand Online And Showcase Your Talent

Building and strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment 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 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation 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 a credible authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.

An expertly configured WordPress blog helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.

(Automatically distribute content across social channels with an expertly configured WordPress blog.)

Spy On Authorities In Your Niche

Being able to monitor social media can help you discover and and maybe even reverse engineer what the experts are doing.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

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. Connecting with others through social media channels can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

What About “Going Viral” Online?

Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising 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 could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore 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 can generally be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that 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 diluting the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do anything, 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 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 person directly, etc.

Many businesses all around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they are not managing their digital reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following scenarios:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 the things you have listed in your job application.

Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

Are you effectively managing your digital reputation?

We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress

Benefiting From Online Trends

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, yesterday’s next big 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 and new content ideas (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 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 may end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or brand 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 Section 1

In the next section we explore essential media tools every WordPress user should know about. To continue reading this article, click here: Media Measurement Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part Two

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