WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected digital world, you need to grow, nurture and engage with a social community around your products, brand, and company, all based around “listening”.

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

Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or products on social media, spot market opportunities, assess competitor activity, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, brands, products, or topics.

As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social activity, volume and sentiments of online conversations, and trends on social media channels like blogs, forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Medium, etc., discussion groups, 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 a cross-section of people including marketing teams, market researchers, online reputation specialists, social marketing agencies, sales teams, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, small businesses do not have the budget to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately many technology companies have developed many tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify consumer behavior around their products or brands allowing them to react to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.

In this article, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc.

WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media

WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and extremely easy to use CMS 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 using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social 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.

Pitch Your Products And Services To A Wider Audience On Your Social Networks 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.

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

BuddyPress

(Set up 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:

• Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• User Groups
• Friend 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 contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.

WPSymposium Pro

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)

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

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

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels

With most social media platforms, syndicating your content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many 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 makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of plugins that allow users to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, 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 syndicate content across social networks with WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Social media tools allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay 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, there are many apps that let you survey customers online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.

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

Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a social marketing strategy.

You are engaging with real people, 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 other user’s comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community finds out about it.

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

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

(You can automate your content syndication on social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)

Study Influencers In Your Niche

Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you observe and discover the success strategies of authorities and influencers in your niche.

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 channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

What About “Going Viral” Online?

Most businesses would love to have a viral hit. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands have failed to take off.

In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, engaging, 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also discuss ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more details, 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
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management

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 many 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 tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

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

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

Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand 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 name 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 all around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they ignore their digital reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related departments. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 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” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

Do you know what customers are saying about you online?

We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective user review management. Go here for more information: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Managing Client Reviews

Tracking Online Trends

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business 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, an outdated fact gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 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. 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 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 site 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 Part One

In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful social tracking tools. To continue reading this article, click here: Essential Social Media Measurement Resources For WordPress – Part Two

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