WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to build and nurture a social community around your services, brand, and company, all based around “listening”.

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

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, services, or company on social media, assess competitor activity, identify market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific products, brands, topics, or businesses.

As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to monitor social activity, trends, and volume and sentiments of online conversations on social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including market researchers, digital reputation specialists, marketing teams, social media marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately various service providers have made available tools and solutions that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about your products or brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users 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 Marketing

WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content publishing platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal application 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 online business goals, go here: How To Grow Your Small Business With A WordPress Blog

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 provides an ideal platform to market your business on social media.

Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networks.

WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

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

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 Messages
• 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 has an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium

(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notifications
• Member Directory
• Groups
• Online 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 Channels

Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.

If you want to drive most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of plugins that allow your site visitors to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate content across social channels with WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Social tracking tools and applications allow you to listen to what your audience wants, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay one step ahead of many 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.

Also, there are many applications that let you survey customers online. Many of these apps will integrate with WordPress.

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

Strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, 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 stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.

Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible 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 site can help establish your your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.

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

Study The Influencers

Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to observe and discover what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing.

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

Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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 brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

Could Your Web Content Be The Next Viral Sensation?

Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands have failed dismally.

In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could 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 meaningful and compelling content. In this course we also explore 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Brands)

In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management
• Tracking Online Trends

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard of 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 many 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 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses 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 defeating the negative impact with 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 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 and spot a negative comment or review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Many companies around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. There’s also the reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the scenarios below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 a lot of 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 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 effective system in place for managing your online reputation in the online economy?

We’ve written an article about a tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage user reviews. Go here for more info: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, 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, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical content with added 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 business 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 Section One

In part 2 we explore top social media resources every business owner should become familiar with. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media Monitoring – Part 2

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