WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected global economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your services, brand, and company.

Social channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give you immediate access to the latest buzz about your products or services.

Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or products on social media, spy on the competition, spot potential market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by online users. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, topics, businesses, or products.

As a tool for business intelligence, social 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 marketing professionals, online reputation management companies, market researchers, sales teams, social media marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately various service providers have made available many affordable tools to facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, enabling companies to track what consumers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about their brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.

In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc.

WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Marketing Platform

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

For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, see this article: The Business Owner’s Guide To Understanding WordPress

Using some of the tools listed in Part Two 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 provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Promote Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks 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, 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 article titles and descriptions for various social networks.

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

BuddyPress

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

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

• 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 an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium

(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notification Bar
• Directory
• Groups
• Online Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels

With most social media platforms, sharing and 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 campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.

If you want to manage your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that encourage users to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication on social channels with WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Social monitoring tools allow you to discover what your audience wants, identify new opportunities and stay one step 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 tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many applications and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.

Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand Online

Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a solid social marketing strategy.

You are trying to engage with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online 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 as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.

Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. 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 blog helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.

(An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog lets you automatically distribute content on various social networks.)

Study Influencers In Your Niche

Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to discover and and perhaps also be inspired by what the experts are doing right.

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

Recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays 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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

What About “Going Viral” Online?

Many businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally 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 in your audience 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 could 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 useful and engaging content. In this course we also discuss ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, go here or subscribe using the form below:

Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses

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

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Tracking Online Trends

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard the term 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 others are saying about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 other people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the work of public relations firms, 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 weakening the negative with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do this, 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/brand and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Businesses are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they are not effectively managing their digital reputations.

Monitoring online conversations extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of average individuals. Consider the scenarios 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” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.

How good is your reputation online?

We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Client Reviews Management For WordPress

Benefiting From Online Trends

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting 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 release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral 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 (how many news media agencies 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 site 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 media monitoring tools that can help grow your business online. To read the rest of this article, click here: Social Media Tracking Tools For WordPress – Part Two

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