WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a web page with static information. To achieve success in today’s connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a social community around your brand, products, and company.

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

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, brand, or company on social media, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by embittered customers, spot new opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on the competition. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.

As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor activity on social media 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 marketing teams, PR companies, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, social marketing agencies, and sales teams. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately different technology providers have developed affordable tools to facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands allowing them to respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.

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

WordPress And Social Media – Social Media Tracking Tools & Applications

WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to use CMS 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.

For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your business grow online, see this article: The Complete Guide To Building Your Successful Small Business With WordPress

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

Promote Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks 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, YouTube and many others.

For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.

WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

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

• 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.

WPSymposium

(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)

WPSymposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who need 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 Channels

With most social media platforms, 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 a considerable amount of time and money.

If you want to run 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 on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your content across social networks with WordPress.

Market Research

Using social tools and services allows you to discover what your market wants, identify new trends and 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.

Additionally, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many apps will integrate with WordPress.

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

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

You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, 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 online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets exposed online.

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-driven site helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress blog to automatically syndicate your content across various social media networks.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to listen in to social conversations can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities 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 can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

What About “Going Viral”?

Many 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 you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.

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 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 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 – Not Just For Big Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Tracking Online Trends

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard of 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 others are saying 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

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

If you or your brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative effects with 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 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 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.

Many companies around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and increase their revenues because they ignore their online reputations.

Monitoring online conversations extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the scenarios below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 an easy “set and forget” 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.

Managing online reputation is becoming more important in the online economy.

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. To learn more, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Reviews Management For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business 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 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 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 and new content ideas (have you noticed how all news media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 a “go to” 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 business 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 Section 1

In the next section we explore media measurement tools for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Monitoring : Useful Resources – Part 2

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