WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

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

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

Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on your competition, and be alerted to disasters. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, topics, products, or businesses.

As a tool for business intelligence, social media signal monitoring 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 marketing professionals, online reputation management (ORM) companies, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and sales teams. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately many technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the tracking of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.

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

Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage CMS 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 why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Everything You Need To Know To Grow Your Small Business Using WordPress

Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, 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 to market your business on social media.

Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social 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 feeds, 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 great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Set up your own social network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• Extended Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• Extensible User Groups
• Friend 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium Pro

(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notification Bar
• User Directory
• Groups
• Online Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels

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

If you want to run 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 has a number of great plugins that allow your site visitors to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 web content syndication across various social media channels using WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Use social media tools and services to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay one step ahead of 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.

Also, many apps and tools are available that let you survey customers online. Many of these applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.

Build Your Credibility And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise

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

You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations for 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 comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community finds out about it.

Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be very time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.

(Automatically distribute content across various social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress blog.)

Study Authority Sites In Your Niche

Being able to listen to social conversations can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of experts and thought leaders in your niche.

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 channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

Could Your Content “Go Viral” Online?

Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands have failed to take off.

In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, informative or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you set up 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 explore ways to create content that has 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

Managing Your Digital Reputation

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 many 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 other people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

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

If you or your brand’s image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative with an excess of positive material, 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business/brand name and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Businesses are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations.

Actively monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security-related agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. Consider the scenarios 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 enough good, positive things published online either to help your case.

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

Are you effectively managing your digital reputation?

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

Understanding Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on YouTube, 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 media broadcasters 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 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your website or business 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 Section One

In part 2 we explore WordPress social media monitoring and tools. To keep reading, click on this link: Media Resources For WordPress Users – Part 2

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