WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

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

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

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your services, brand, or company on social media, assess competitor activity and market dominance, be alerted to crises, identify opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. It can also provide valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.

As a business intelligence tool, social 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 marketing professionals, PR agencies, market researchers, sales teams, social media marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately many technology providers have developed affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands or products so they can react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.

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

WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and easy to use CMS 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 the WordPress content publishing software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, 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 An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media 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, 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 content for various social networkign sites.

WordPress is not only great for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be completely 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
• Friendship 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 an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WP Symposium

(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)

WPSymposium provides 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
• Online 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 Many Social Channels

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

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 makes available a number of plugins that encourage users to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 distribute content across various social channels using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Market Research

Social marketing tools and applications allow you to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new 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 your social pages.

Also, many applications are available that let you survey customers online. Many of these apps and tools can be integrated with WordPress.

Build Your Credibility And Brand Online

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

You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, 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 be extremely time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress blog can help establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.

(An expertly configured WordPress-driven website lets you automate web content syndication on various social channels.)

Know What Your Competition Is Doing

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

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

It’s no secret that 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 media can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

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

Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success 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, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and engaging content. In this free course we also explore 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small

(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
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management

You have probably heard about 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 others are saying about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative stuff online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

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

If you or your brand’s 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 effects with positive material, 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 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 yourself or your business 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 are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not effectively managing their digital reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large brands, celebrities, and security departments. There’s also the reputation of individuals. Consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.

Do you know what users are saying about you online?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage user feedback. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Management Of Customer Reviews

Tracking Online Trends

Regardless of which 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 say something controversial that gets 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 goes viral on Twitter, 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 and new content ideas (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. 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 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 people will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part 1

In part two we explore social media tracking resources for WordPress users. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress – Part 2

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