WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s interconnected digital economy, you need to build and nurture a community around your company, services, and brand and ”listen” to what they have to say.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your brand and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest buzz around your products or services.

Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spot market opportunities, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, avert crises, and assess competitor activity and market share. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.

As a business intelligence tool, social media 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 people including digital reputation management (ORM) specialists, market research, marketing professionals, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.

Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed a range of tools to facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what is being said online about their products or brands allowing them to react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely manner.

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

WordPress And Social Media

WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and really easy to use CMS 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.

To learn more about why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, see this article: Learning WordPress – The Business Owner’s Guide

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article, you will be able to tap into the new social business marketing opportunities.

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

Promote Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social 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, 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 networks.

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

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

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

• Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• User Groups
• Friend 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 platform.

WP Symposium Pro

(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)

WPSymposium 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
• Notifications
• 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

Many social media platforms 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 from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also has many plugins that allow users to share your 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 distribute your content across social media networks using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Using social media marketing tools and applications allows you to listen to what your market wants, identify trends and new 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 those social networks.

Also, there are many apps that let you survey customers online. Many of these tools will easily integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Business Reputation And Brand

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

You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of 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 and how you respond online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when their response or behavior gets exposed online.

Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also take up a lot of your time.

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

(An expertly configured WordPress blog can automate your web content syndication on various social channels.)

Study Niche Authorities

Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you reverse engineer what thought leaders 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 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 grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

“Going Viral” Faster

Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands 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 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore many ways to create content that has 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 – 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 (ORM)
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

You have probably heard of 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 said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

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

If you or your brand’s image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of weakening the negative impact 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 come in. 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 website or person directly, etc.

Companies around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not monitoring their online reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. The ability to monitor the reputation of of an average individual is also very important. For example, consider the following scenarios:

• 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 help your case.

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 things in a timely manner.

Do you have a strategy to manage your online reputation in the digital economy?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective user review management. For more information, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which niche or industry you are 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 release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 (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 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 could 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 content that other online users will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Section 1

In part two we explore 29 media resources every business owner should know about. To continue reading this article, click here: 29 Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress – Part 2

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