WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged social community around your brand, services, and company.

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

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, identify market opportunities, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of campaigns, and avert crises. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.

As a business intelligence tool, 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 marketing teams, PR agencies, market researchers, social media marketing agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately different technology companies have developed tools that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what is being said online about their brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.

In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc.

WordPress And Social Media

WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible 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 using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social business marketing opportunities.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience 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, 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 CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

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

• Extended Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• User Groups
• Friendship Connections
• Discussion Forums
• Notifications
• Many Add-On Features

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 open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WP Symposium Pro

(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Mail
• Notification Bar
• 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 your pages and posts using shortcodes.

Share Your Content Across Multiple Channels

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

If you want to drive most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content online 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 automate your web content syndication on social networks with WordPress.

Market Research

Social tools and services allow you to discover what your target audience wants, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step 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 those social networks.

Additionally, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Brand And Online Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche

Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.

You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community gets hold of the news.

Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.

An expertly configured WordPress website can help establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.

(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you automatically distribute content across social channels.)

Study Niche Authorities

Being able to monitor social media allows you to 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 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 can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?

Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success 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 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 Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many 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 Businesses

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)

In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

You have probably heard of 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

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

If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative with 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 spot 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 yourself or your business/brand 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 all over the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.

Monitoring online conversations extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also very important. Consider the situations below:

• 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 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, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.

Managing your online reputation should not be avoided if you want your business to grow in the web economy.

We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective customer review management. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress

Monitoring Online Trends

Regardless of which 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 promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral 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 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 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 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other people will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In part 2 we explore dozens of social media measurement tools for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: Top Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress Users – Part Two

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