WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your company is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your brand, products, and company.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give you direct access to the latest buzz about your services or products.

Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, services, or brand on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spot market opportunities, and avert impending crises. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific topics, businesses, products, 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 groups that include market research, marketing teams, PR staff, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.

Fortunately different providers have made available tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify what is being said online about your brand allowing you to react to conversations and interact with online users in a timely fashion.

In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.

Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media?

WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content management 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.

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 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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.

Promote Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Social Media 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networks.

WordPress 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

(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:

• Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• Extensible User Groups
• Friendship Connections
• Discussion 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 an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WP Symposium

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)

WPSymposium Pro provides members with 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 platforms 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 strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that encourage users to easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your web content syndication across various social channels using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Market Research

Social media tools and services allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify 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, many tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these apps will easily integrate with WordPress.

Strengthen Your Brand And Credibility

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

You are engaging with real people, 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 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 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 paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.

Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.

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

(Automatically distribute your content on social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven blog.)

Study Authority Sites In Your Niche

Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to observe and and maybe even be inspired by the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

Could Your Content Be The Next Viral Sensation?

Most 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 money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.

In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, informative or “spot-on”, 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content. In this 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small

(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Tracking Online Trends

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard about 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 if what is being posted 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. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

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

If you or your brand’s image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative effects with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do this, 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 find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Businesses all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, and security departments. There’s also the online reputation of average individuals. For example, consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 enough good, positive things published online either to help your case.

Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.

Do you know what people are saying about your business online?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress

Tracking Online Trends

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Twitter, 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 provides 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 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 brand 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 One

In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful tools for monitoring social activities. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking : Tools – Part 2

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