WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

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

Social channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your target audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest news about your products or services.

Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, be alerted to disasters, spot opportunities for engagement, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, businesses, brands, or products.

As a business intelligence tool, social media monitoring 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 online reputation management (ORM) companies, market researchers, marketing professionals, sales teams, social media marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately various service providers have developed tools that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track consumer behavior around their brands allowing them to react to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.

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

WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform

WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content publishing 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 the benefits of using the WP CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article, you will be able to explore the new social business marketing opportunities.

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

Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers 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 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 ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social networking, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

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

Set up your own social community on your website, with member profiles, messaging, user groups, activity streams, and more.

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 contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.

WPSymposium

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)

WP Symposium 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
• Notification Bar
• Directory
• Groups
• Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels

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

If you want to drive your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, read the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication on social media with WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Use social media tools and applications to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new opportunities and stay 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 your social pages.

Also, many applications and tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these tools can be integrated with WordPress.

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

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

You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Put the needs of your audience first, 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community finds out about it.

Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also take up a lot of your time.

An expertly configured WordPress-driven site is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.

(Automatically distribute content on various social media networks using an expertly configured WordPress blog.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to observe and and maybe also reverse engineer the success strategies of experts and thought leaders in your niche.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 media can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

“Going 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 you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands 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 even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, go here or subscribe using the form below:

Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands

(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 (ORM)
• Online Trend Monitoring

Managing Your Digital Reputation

You have probably heard of 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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said 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 will tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative material 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 PR firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.

If you or your image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative impact with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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 yourself or your business/brand name 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 website or person directly, etc.

Businesses everywhere are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.

Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider these 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 support the things you have listed in your job application.

Even if you are just starting out, you can still create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

How well are you managing your online reputation?

We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage user feedback. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress

Benefiting From Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, 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 provides 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 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 an authoritative 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 post in their content.

This is the end of Part 1

In part two we explore dozens of social media tracking tools for WordPress. To read the rest of this article, click here: WordPress Tools For Social Media Monitoring – Part Two

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