Category: WordPress & Social Media

The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s highly connected world, you need to build and nurture an engaged social community around your brand, products, and company and ”listen” to what they have to say.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest news about your services or products.

Monitoring social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your services, company, or brand on social media, identify market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, and assess competitor activity. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific topics, products, businesses, or brands.

As a business intelligence tool, social media monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including PR companies, marketing professionals, market researchers, social media marketing agencies, professional sales reps, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately a number of service providers have made available affordable tools that facilitate the active tracking of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your products or brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with online users in various social media platforms.

In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about.

Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For 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 application for growing your online presence in the social realm.

For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, see this article: WordPress In Small Business – An Online Guide To Growing Your Successful Small Business Using WordPress

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, you will be able to tap into full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.

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 Services And Products To A Wider Audience On Social Media 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, YouTube 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 article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.

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

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• Extensible User Groups
• Friendship Connections
• Discussion 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WP Symposium Pro

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)

WPSymposium Pro 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
• Member Directory
• Groups
• Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Many 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 many social channels and manage your social media campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.

If you want to run your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your web content across social media channels with WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Market Research

Using social media tools and applications allows you to discover what consumers want, identify trends and new business 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 apps and tools are available that let you run surveys online. Many applications will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Brand And Credibility Online And Establish Authority In Your Niche

Strengthening your brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, patience and a social marketing strategy.

You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on your target audience, and listen to their conversations to gain 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 online and how you respond to comments and discussions is very important. 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 provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also be very demanding on your time.

An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you build authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.

(Automate your web content syndication across various social channels using an expertly configured WordPress site.)

Study Influencers In Your Niche

Being able to listen to social media conversations can help you observe and learn 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 social media 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 grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

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

Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute marketing 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 will find so useful, compelling, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and compelling content. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content that has 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 – Not Just For Global Brands)

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

You have probably heard the term 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 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 things go 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 companies and individuals online.

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

Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you 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/brand and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Businesses everywhere are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they ignore their online reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the following situations:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 enough 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 a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online, 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 simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For User Reviews Management

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate in, there are always new things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets 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 Twitter, 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 sites now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 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 others will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Section 1

In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social monitoring tools. To read the rest of this article, click on this link: Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress – Part 2

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