WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s connected global and digital economy, you need to build and nurture a social community around your brand, products, and company and ”listen” to their feedback.

Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest buzz about your services or products.

Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, identify market opportunities, avert disasters, and spy on your competitors. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, businesses, brands, or topics.

As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social media channels like blogs, internet forums, social networking sites, micro-blogging platforms, message boards, video sites, and user-generated content is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by a cross-section of groups that include marketing teams, market researchers, online reputation management (ORM) specialists, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community staff, and sales teams. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately many service providers have made available many affordable tools that facilitate the monitoring of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.

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

WordPress And Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage 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 WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, go here: Everything You Need To Know To Grow Your Small Business Online Using A WordPress Blog

Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article 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 is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Pitch Your Services And Products To A Wider 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, YouTube and many others.

For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networks.

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

BuddyPress

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

This plugin can be used to run a social networking community on WordPress.

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 platform.

WPSymposium

(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Mail
• Notifications
• 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.

Share 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 manage 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 users to easily share your web 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 web content across social media with WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Market Research

Social marketing tools and services allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new 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 your social networking sites.

Also, many apps are available that let you run surveys online. Many apps can be integrated with WordPress.

Build Your Business Credibility And Brand Online

Building and strengthening your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust 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 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated 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 take up a lot of your time.

An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share valuable content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress site to automate your content syndication across social channels.)

Study Influencers In Your Niche

Being able to monitor social media can help you reverse engineer the success strategies of experts and influencers in your niche.

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

It’s no secret that recruitment companies research social media 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 potentially lucrative new ventures.

What About “Going Viral”?

Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget 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, entertaining or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created 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 ways to create content that has 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

Managing Your Digital Reputation

You have probably heard about 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 others are saying about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. 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 do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now 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 defeating the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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 name and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Many companies everywhere are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.

Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the reputation of average individuals. Consider the situations below:

• 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 the things you have listed in your job application.

Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” 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.

Do you have a system to manage your online reputation in the online economy?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (how many news media outlets now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 a “go to” 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Part 1

In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful tools for measuring social activities. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress – Part 2

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