WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

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

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

Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or products on social media, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, identify market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and assess competitor activity and market dominance. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, topics, businesses, or brands.

As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to track social media channels like blogging, internet forums, social networking sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Medium, etc., message boards, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include digital reputation management companies, market research, marketing teams, social engagement and community staff, sales teams, and social marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately various technology providers have developed a range of tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their brands so they can react to conversations and interact with online users in a timely manner.

In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.

WordPress And Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.

To learn more about using WordPress please see 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 the new social business 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 Services And Products 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 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 publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Run your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

Set up your own social networking community 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 an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WP Symposium

(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Mail
• Notification Bar
• Member Directory
• Groups
• 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.

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels

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

If you want to manage your social marketing strategy 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 your site visitors to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication on social media networks using WordPress.

Market Research

Using social tools and services allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new 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 your social networking sites.

Additionally, many apps and tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.

Strengthen Your Business Brand And Online Reputation

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

You are engaging with real people online, 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. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation 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 a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also take up a lot of your time.

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

(You can automate your web content syndication on social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress website.)

Spy On Your Competition

Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to observe and discover what experts in your niche are doing right.

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

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

Could Your Web Content Be The Next Online Viral “Hit”?

Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns 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, 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free 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 Global Businesses)

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Online Trend Monitoring

Online Reputation Management

You have probably heard the term 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 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 brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

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

If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can begin to repair any damage, 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/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 person directly, etc.

Many businesses around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.

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

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 enough good, positive things published online either to help your case.

Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to 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 it in a timely manner.

How are you managing your online reputation in the web economy?

We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news media outlets 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 your 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 information that other online users will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In the next section we explore social media monitoring resources for WordPress. To read the rest of this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media Tracking – Part Two

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