Category: WordPress Business Strategies

The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your company, brand, and products.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give you instant access to the latest buzz about your products or services.

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your products, brand, or company on social media, spot new market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, and avert disasters. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific brands, businesses, products, 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 a cross-section of groups that include market researchers, PR staff, marketing teams, professional sales reps, agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately various technology companies have developed many affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a wide range of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to respond proactively to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.

In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.

WordPress And Social Media

WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and easy to manage content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing your online presence in the social realm.

To learn more about why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, see this article: An Online Guide To Growing Your Successful Small Business With WordPress

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in the next section of this article, you will be able to tap into the full power of marketing your business on social media.

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 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.

WordPress 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 site, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

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

BuddyPress 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
• Online 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 contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WP Symposium Pro

(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messages
• 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 pages and posts using shortcodes.

Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels

Many social media tools 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 strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, see the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your content on social networks with WordPress.

Market Research

Use social tools to listen to what your target audience wants, identify new business opportunities and stay 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 network pages.

Also, there are many tools that let you run surveys online. Many apps will easily integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Business Brand And Online Reputation And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Area Of Expertise

Building and strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, dedication and a robust 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 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 comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when the online community finds out about it.

Although social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels, it can also take up a lot of your time.

An expertly configured WordPress-driven site helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.

(You can automate your content syndication across various social channels with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)

Spy On Your Competition

Being able to monitor social media allows you to observe and discover what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing right.

Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

Could Your Content “Go Viral”?

Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed to take off.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users will find so useful, engaging, entertaining 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 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 will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this 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 – Not Just For Large Brands

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

Social media monitoring activities 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 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 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 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, 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 defeating the negative effects with an excess of 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business/brand name and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Many companies all over the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and retain existing ones because they are not monitoring their digital reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of individuals is also very important. Consider the scenarios below:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 enough 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 about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

How good is your reputation online?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business through effective user review management. More information: Power Online Reviews – User 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 get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies publish useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something goes viral 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 can provide 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. 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 website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Section One

In the next section we explore WordPress resources and social media measurement. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Resources For Tracking Social Indicators – Part 2

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