WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected digital economy, you need to grow and nurture an engaged social community around your brand, services, and company, based around actively “listening”.

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

Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, avert impending crises, and spot new market opportunities. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.

As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to track activity on social media channels like blogging, forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., message boards, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 groups that include market researchers, digital reputation managers, marketing teams, professional sales reps, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately various technology providers have developed tools to facilitate the tracking of a wide range of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict what is being said online about your products or brand allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.

In this article, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.

WordPress And Social Media

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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.

Using some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the 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.

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

WordPress includes 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.

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

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

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

• Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• Extensible User Groups
• Friend Connections
• Online 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium

(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)

WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members 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 features to pages and posts using shortcodes.

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social 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 run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that allow users to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your content on various social media networks using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Social media monitoring tools allow you to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay 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 tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps and tools can be integrated with WordPress.

Build And Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand

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

You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. 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 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 paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.

Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.

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

(An expertly configured WordPress-driven website can automatically distribute content across various social media channels.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and discover what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.

Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

What About “Going Viral” Online?

Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands have failed.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, informative or even funny, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free 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 – Not Just For Large Businesses

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

You have probably heard the term 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 is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

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

If you or your image, good 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 an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do anything, 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 your name or your business and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Companies everywhere are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security-related departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 a lot of 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” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.

Do you have an effective digital reputation management strategy in place?

We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on YouTube, yesterday’s must-have new 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 (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 topical content with your 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 information that other online users will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part 1

In the next section we explore social media tools that can help grow your business online. To read more, click on this link: WordPress And Social Media Tracking – Part 2

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