WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s connected global economy, you need to build a community around your company, products, and brand, based around actively “listening”.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your business and consumers and give you direct access to the latest news around your products or services.

Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns, spot market opportunities, assess competitor activity, and be alerted to disasters. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, brands, products, or topics.

As a business intelligence tool, social signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include marketing professionals, PR staff, market research, social marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately various technology companies have developed a range of affordable and even free tools that facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify what consumers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about their products or brands allowing them to react to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.

In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.

WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform

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

To learn more about why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, go here: The Business Owner’s Guide To WordPress

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 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 Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, 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 publishing and marketing 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 WordPress plugin)

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

• Member 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium

(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messages
• Notification Bar
• Member Directory
• Groups
• Online Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels

With most social media platforms, sharing and syndicating content is very easy. There are services and tools 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 most of 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 great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your web content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate web content syndication on various social media channels using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Market Research

Social media marketing tools and applications allow you to listen to 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 accounts.

Also, many applications are available that let you run surveys online. Many of these applications and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Business Brand And Credibility And Showcase Your Talent

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

You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets exposed online.

Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. 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 is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share valuable information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress site to automate content syndication across various social channels.)

Spy On Authorities In Your Niche

Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and and maybe even be inspired by the success strategies of authorities, experts, and influencers in your niche.

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

It’s no secret that recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays 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 to explore new opportunities and joint ventures can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

Could Your Content “Go Viral” Online?

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 out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations have failed dismally.

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 “spot-on”, 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 provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this course we also discuss many 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 – Not Just For Big Businesses

(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Monitoring Online Trends

Online Reputation Management

You have probably heard of online reputation management (ORM). 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 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 will tell 10 more 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 do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is now an issue that 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 diminishing the negative 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 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 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 person directly, etc.

Many companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not effectively managing their digital reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, and security-related departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also very important. For example, consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody dispute 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 the things you have listed in your job application.

Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with things 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 WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage user reviews. More info: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users

Understanding Online Trends

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, 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 and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on social media, 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 (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 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 people will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In the next section we explore dozens of social media measurement tools for WordPress users. To read more, click on this link: Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress – Part 2

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