WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your company and products is not enough. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your products, company, and brand.

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

Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, be alerted to impending crises, assess competitor activity and market share, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and identify market opportunities. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, products, topics, or brands.

As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor social media channels like blogging, forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms, discussion groups, 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 various groups that include market research, marketing professionals, online reputation specialists, social engagement and community staff, sales teams, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately different providers have created a range of affordable and even free tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about.

WordPress And Social Media

WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and extremely easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: The Business Owner’s Guide To Understanding WordPress

Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social Media 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.

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

(Run your own social network with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

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

• Extended Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• Extensible 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 has a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium Pro

(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)

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

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

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels

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

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 makes available many plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content across social channels using WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Using social tools and services allows you to listen to what your market wants, identify new trends and opportunities and stay one step 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, there are applications that let you run surveys online. Many applications will easily integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Reputation And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry

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

You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, 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 online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.

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

An expertly configured WordPress website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress blog to automate web content syndication on various social channels.)

Spy On Your Competition

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

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

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 channels can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

“Go Viral” Faster

Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands and corporations 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, engaging, 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 provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging 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 info, go here or subscribe using the form below:

Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Tracking Online Trends

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 negative comments, reviews, etc.. 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 competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage 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 brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diminishing the negative with an excess of 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 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.

Many businesses around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of individuals. For example, consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 help your case.

Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.

How well are you managing your online reputation in the online economy?

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

Monitoring 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 publish useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated 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 (how many 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 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In the next section we explore 25+ social media monitoring resources for WordPress. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: 30 Media Tracking Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part Two

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