WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To achieve success in today’s interconnected world, you need to grow and nurture an engaged community around your services, brand, and company, based around ”listening” to their needs and feedback.

Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give you instant access to the latest information around your products or services.

Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, identify market opportunities, spy on your competitors, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide you with valuable 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 track social media channels like blogging, internet forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Quora, etc., message boards, video sites, and user-generated content 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 market researchers, marketing teams, digital reputation management companies, professional sales reps, social engagement and community personnel, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately many providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc.

Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and easy to manage content management 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 WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, go here: Everything You Need To Know About Growing Your Small Business Using WordPress

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 business marketing opportunities.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.

The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be completely transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking website 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:

• Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• 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 has an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WP Symposium Pro

(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

WP Symposium Pro provides members with a strong support community and assistance for members 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 social features to your posts and pages using shortcodes.

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels

With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating 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 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 has many great plugins that encourage users to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. 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 channels with WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Use social media marketing tools and applications to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and business 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.

Also, there are many apps that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many of these applications will integrate with WordPress.

Build And Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand

Strengthening your business brand and online reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience and a solid social marketing strategy.

You are trying to engage 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 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, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.

Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also be very time-consuming.

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

(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven site to automate your web content syndication across various social media channels.)

Study The Influencers

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

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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

What About “Going Viral”?

Most 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 achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this 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 Businesses

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Businesses)

Social media monitoring can generally 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 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

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

If you or your image, name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of diluting the negative with an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do this, 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business and spot a negative comment or review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Businesses are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.

Monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond large brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of individuals. For example, consider these situations:

• 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, it’s good to create a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if any conversations about you do 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 WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user reviews. More info: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users

Online Trend Monitoring

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 get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 and new content ideas (how many news media channels 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 your 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 a “go to” 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 business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others 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 indicators. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Monitoring Tools For WordPress Users – Part Two

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