WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

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

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

Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, avert impending crises, and spot market opportunities. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.

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, typically carried out by various groups that include PR staff, marketing professionals, market researchers, social marketing agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.

Fortunately different technology providers have developed affordable tools and solutions to facilitate the monitoring of a wide spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about their products or brands so they can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.

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

WordPress And Social Media

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, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.

To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 marketing opportunities.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress is 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 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 networkign sites.

WordPress 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

(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

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

• Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• Extensible User Groups
• Friend Connections
• Online 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium

(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Mail
• Notifications
• User Directory
• Groups
• Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels

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

If you want to drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your web content on various social media channels using WordPress.

Market Research

Use social tracking tools to listen to what consumers want, 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 your social networking sites.

Additionally, there are many applications that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Credibility And Brand

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

You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be genuine and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, and listen to their conversations to gain 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, 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 their response or behavior gets exposed online.

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 website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It can help establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.

(Automate your content syndication across social media using an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to monitor social media can help you discover and and maybe also reverse engineer the success strategies of authorities, experts, and thought leaders in your niche.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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. Connecting with others through social channels can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

Could Your Content Be The Next Viral Sensation?

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 you cannot control. Throwing loads of money at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands have failed.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience 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 the next section of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

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

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Monitoring Online Trends

Managing Your Online 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before 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 competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.

If you or your brand’s 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 an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you 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 your name or your business/brand name 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.

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

Monitoring online conversations extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security-related departments. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations 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, it’s good to 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 respond in a timely manner.

Online reputation management should not be ignored if you want your business to grow in the web economy.

We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage user reviews. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress

Analyzing 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 promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 (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 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 brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In part 2 we explore WordPress social media monitoring and useful resources. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users – Part 2

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