WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to just put up a web page with static information. To achieve business success in today’s connected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building an engaged community around your company, products, and brand.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection immediate access to the latest news around your products or services.

Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, products, or brand on social media, spy on your competitors, identify opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of campaigns, and take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, topics, products, or businesses.

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 a cross-section of people including digital reputation managers, marketing teams, market research, professional sales reps, social engagement and community personnel, and social marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately different technology companies have developed many affordable tools to facilitate the active tracking of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your brand or products so you can react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that are worth checking out and knowing about.

Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media

WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.

To learn more about why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, go here: WordPress In Business – The Beginner’s Guide To Growing A Successful Business Using WordPress

Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, 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 is an ideal platform to market 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 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.

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

BuddyPress

(Set up your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

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

WP Symposium Pro

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)

WPSymposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members 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 Multiple Social Channels

With most social media tools, syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels simultaneously and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.

If you want to drive your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow users to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, 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 networks using WordPress.

Market Research

Social measuring tools and applications allow you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and 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.

Additionally, many applications are available that let you survey customers online. Many tools will easily integrate with WordPress.

Strengthen Your Business Brand And Credibility

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

You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, 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 to users online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community finds out about it.

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-driven website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.

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

Study The Influencers

Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of experts, authorities, and influencers in your niche.

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

It’s no secret that 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

“Go Viral” Faster

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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large and well-funded campaigns have failed.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, 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 Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. 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 – Not Just For Global Brands)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

You have probably heard of 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business 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 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 diminishing the negative with positive material, 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Companies all around the world are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security departments. Being able to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also very important. Consider the scenarios 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, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

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

We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer reviews. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Management Of User Feedback

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on Twitter, 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 (how many news media broadcasters now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 site or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Part 1

In the next section we explore social media monitoring resources for WordPress. To read the rest of this article, click here: 29 Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress – Part Two

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