WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a page on your website with static information about your company is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, you need to build, nurture and engage with a community around your company, brand, and services and “listen”.

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

Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, brand, or company on social media, identify market opportunities, spy on your competition, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.

As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor social media channels like blogging, forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms, discussion groups, video/photo sharing sites, and user-generated content (UGC) is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by a cross-section of groups that include marketing teams, market research, online reputation specialists, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately many technology providers have developed a range of tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what is being said online about their brands so they can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.

In this article, we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.

Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?

WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to use content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal platform for growing your online presence in the social realm.

For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help your business succeed online, go here: Using WordPress – The Small Business Owner’s Guide

Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the full power of social media.

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 Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, 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 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)

BuddyPress 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 often referred to 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 open source plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium Pro

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)

WP Symposium Pro 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 Mail
• Notification Bar
• User 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.

Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels

With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. There are services and tools 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 a considerable amount of time and money.

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 a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 on various social networks using WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Using social media tools allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new 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 your social network pages.

Also, many tools are available that let you survey customers online. Many apps will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Brand And Online Reputation

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

You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on 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 customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community finds out about it.

Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be very time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven website to automatically syndicate content on social media channels.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to listen to social media conversations allows you to discover and and maybe also be inspired by the success strategies of experts and influencers in your niche.

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

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 to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

Could Your Web Content Be The Next Viral “Hit”?

Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “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 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, 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss 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 Big Businesses

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Monitoring Online Trends

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard the term online reputation management (ORM). If you haven’t, you will be hearing 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 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material 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 services of PR companies, 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 reducing the negative effects with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

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

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

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. The ability to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also important. For example, consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 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 things in a timely manner.

Do you have an online reputation management strategy in place?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your products through effective user review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing User Reviews

Predicting Online Trends

Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new 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, something outdated gets updated, something goes viral on social media, 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 media agencies now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting topical 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 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 the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful resources for measuring social metrics. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Resources: Media Tracking – Part Two

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