WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve 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, services, and brand.

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

Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, identify market opportunities, spy on your competitors, avert impending crises, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, topics, brands, or products.

As a business intelligence tool, social 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 marketing teams, market researchers, PR companies, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and agencies. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.

Fortunately a number of service providers have created affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict what consumers are saying about their brands so they can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.

In this article, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out.

WordPress And Social Media

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, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.

To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your business grow and succeed online, see this article: The Complete Guide To Building A Successful Business Using A WordPress Site

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.

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 The Right Audience On Your Social 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, YouTube and many others.

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

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

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

This free WordPress plugin lets you run your own social networking community on your website.

BuddyPress is known as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin boasts an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium Pro

(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)

WP Symposium Pro offers a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notification Bar
• Directory
• Groups
• 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 Social Channels

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

If you want to manage 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 encourage users to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication across social media with WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Social measuring tools allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business 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.

Also, many tools are available that let you run surveys online. Many of these applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.

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

Strengthening your business reputation and brand, 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 genuine and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, and listen to their conversations for 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 other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very 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 everywhere. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, 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 content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.

(Automatically syndicate your content on social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)

Spy On Authorities In Your Niche

Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what the experts are doing.

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

Could Your Content Be The Next Online 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 out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large brands and corporations 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, engaging, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many ways to create content that has 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 Large Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)

Social media monitoring activities 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. 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 is being said 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 will tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things 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 brand’s image, name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative impact 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 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 your name or your business 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 person directly, etc.

Companies are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not effectively managing their digital reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also very important. Consider the following situations:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

Do you have an online reputation management strategy in place?

We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. More information: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what 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 get mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 (have you noticed how all news sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Section One

In part 2 we explore 30 media measurement tools that can help grow your business online. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Tools For Measuring Social Metrics – Part 2

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