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 grow and nurture an engaged community around your company, services, and brand, based around actively ”listening” to their needs and feedback.

Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give you direct access to the latest news around your services or products.

Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific businesses, products, topics, or brands.

As a tool for business intelligence, social signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including market research, online reputation management (ORM) companies, marketing professionals, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately many technology companies have developed affordable tools and solutions that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand or products so you can react to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.

In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that you may want to check out.

WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and extremely easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.

To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to tap into 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.

Promote Your Products And Services To A Wider 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 social networkign sites.

The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

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

BuddyPress allows you to set up a social network on your site, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, 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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notifications
• Member Directory
• Groups
• Online Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels

With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.

If you want to manage most of your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across various social channels using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Market Research

Social media measuring tools allow you to discover what your market wants, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay ahead of many 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.

Additionally, there are apps and tools that let you survey customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.

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

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

You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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 online is very important. Everyday we hear 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 circulated online.

Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be extremely time-consuming.

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

(You can automate web content syndication on various social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress website.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and discover what the experts 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 channels can grow 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 quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally 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 will find so useful, compelling, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content. In this course we also explore ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more information, 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 Businesses)

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Online Trend Monitoring

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard about 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 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

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

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

Businesses all around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. There’s also the online reputation of individuals. Consider the situations 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support 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 does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

Are you effectively managing your digital reputation?

We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage user feedback. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management For WordPress

Analyzing Online Trends

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (have you noticed how all news media channels 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 online users will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Section One

In part 2 we explore media tools that can help grow your business online. To keep reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Resources For Measuring Social Indicators – Part 2

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