Category: WordPress & Social Media

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

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

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spot opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of campaigns, spy on your competitors, and help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users. It can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific businesses, topics, brands, or products.

As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by a cross-section of people including online reputation management (ORM) agencies, marketing professionals, market research, social engagement and community personnel, professional sales reps, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.

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

In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about.

WordPress And Social Media Marketing – Social Media Monitoring Tools & Applications

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

To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Pitch Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Your Social Media Networks 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 cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.

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

BuddyPress

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

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

• Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium Pro

(WP Symposium WordPress social network plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notifications
• Member Directory
• Groups
• Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Social Channels

With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels simultaneously and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you time and money.

If you want to manage your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of plugins that encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate your content syndication across social media channels using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Using social media tools allows you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify new trends and business opportunities and stay one step ahead of your competition.

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.

Additionally, many tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create customer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these applications can be integrated with WordPress.

Build Your Business Reputation And Brand Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche

Building your reputation and brand online, showcasing your talent, 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 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets exposed online.

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 blog lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.

(You can automatically distribute content on social networks using an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)

Spy On Authorities In Your Niche

Being able to listen to social conversations allows you to discover and and perhaps also reverse engineer what experts and leaders in your niche are doing right.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

Could Your Content “Go Viral”?

Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits 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 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 Part Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling 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. For more information, 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)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

Managing Your Digital 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 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 other people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if left 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 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 do anything, 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 yourself or your business/brand and a negative comment or review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Many businesses everywhere are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of individuals. Consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 your job application.

Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “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 it in a timely manner.

Online reputation management is becoming more a vital aspect of doing business online.

We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress

Benefiting From Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate in, there are always new 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, 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 (how many news media agencies 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 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 site or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Section 1

In part 2 we explore social media tracking resources for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Resources For Media Measurement – Part 2

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