WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected world, you need to build and nurture a social community around your company, brand, and products and “listen”.

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

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or services on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, identify new opportunities for engagement, and assess competitor activity and market dominance. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, businesses, topics, or products.

As a tool for business intelligence, social monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of people including online reputation managers, market research, marketing teams, professional sales reps, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately various technology providers have developed many affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.

In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about.

Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and very easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it 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 WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Social Media 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 content for various social networks.

WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely 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 plugin can be used to set up a social network on WordPress, with member profiles, user groups, messaging, activity streams, and more.

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

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 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 posts and pages using shortcodes.

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels

With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating your content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.

If you want to run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that allow users to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content across various social media networks with WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Using social tools and services allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new business 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 network pages.

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

Build Your Business Brand And Reputation

Strengthening your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, or establishing your authority online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.

You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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 and how you respond online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when their response or behavior gets circulated online.

Social media lets you be seen and known everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be very demanding on your time.

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

(An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you automate web content syndication on social media channels.)

Study Niche Authorities

Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer what experts and thought leaders in your niche are doing right.

Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Using social media to explore new opportunities can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

What About “Going Viral”?

Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “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 marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands have failed to take off.

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 “spot-on”, 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 will show you how to create useful and engaging content. In this course we also discuss 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands)

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Tracking Online Trends

Managing Your Digital Reputation

You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). 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 others are saying about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before 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 competing businesses 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 public relations companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 diminishing the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you 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 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 do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Many companies are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of individuals. For example, consider these situations:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 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 an easy “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 the situation in a timely manner.

Do you know what customers are saying about you online?

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

Understanding Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new 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 release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (have you noticed how all news media broadcasters 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 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Part 1

In part 2 we explore WordPress social media monitoring tools. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Measurement Resources For WordPress – Part Two

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