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, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your services, brand, and company.

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

Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, spy on your competition, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, and measure the impact of campaigns. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.

As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including PR staff, market researchers, marketing professionals, social media marketing agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately various technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify what is being said online about their brands so they can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.

In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out.

Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?

WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to use content publishing 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 please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.

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

Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Social Media With WordPress

WordPress comes with 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, Pinterest 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 networkign sites.

The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content 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 website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

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

• Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WP Symposium Pro

(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messages
• Notification Bar
• Directory
• Groups
• Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels

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

If you want to manage most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 on social networks using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Using social media tools and services allows you to discover what your audience wants, 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 those social networks.

Also, there are many applications that let you run surveys online. Many of these apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.

Build And Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand

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

You are engaging 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 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 users online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.

Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.

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

(You can automate content syndication across various social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)

Know What Your Competition Is Doing

Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to discover and and maybe even reverse engineer what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.

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

It’s no secret that recruitment companies research 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 grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

Could Your Content “Go Viral”?

Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands and corporations have failed dismally.

In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, 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 the next section 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 for your readers. In this 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Monitoring Online Trends

Managing Your Online Reputation

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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

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

If you or your brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative effects with positive material, 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 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Companies are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively managing their online reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. Being able to monitor the online reputation of of individuals is also important. Consider the following scenarios:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody battle 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 support your job application.

Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

How well do you manage your online reputation?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Management Of Customer Feedback

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Twitter, 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 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 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 content that other online users will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Section 1

In part two we explore WordPress resources for social media tracking. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: Social Media Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part 2

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