WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s no longer enough to put up a web page with static information. To achieve business success in today’s connected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience’s needs and feedback, and building a community around your brand, services, and company.

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

Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or services on social media, spy on the competition, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, identify new opportunities for engagement, and measure the impact of campaigns. It can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, products, or businesses.

As a business intelligence tool, being able to track volume and sentiments of social conversations and social activity on social media channels like blogs, forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, message boards, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 groups that include online reputation managers, marketing teams, market researchers, social engagement and community staff, sales teams, and agencies. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.

Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a broad range of social media channels, allowing you to identify what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about your products or brand allowing you to react to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.

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

WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and very easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.

For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help your business succeed online, see this article: WordPress For Small Business Owners – An Online Guide To Growing Your Business Using A WordPress Blog

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.

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

Promote Your Products And Services To The Right Audience On Social Media 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.

The WordPress CMS platform is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network, 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:

• 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 a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium Pro

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Mail
• Notification Bar
• 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 Many Channels

With most social media tools, syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you a considerable amount of 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 has many plugins that allow your site visitors to share your web 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 automate your web content syndication on various social networks using WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Using social measuring tools and services allows you to discover what your target audience wants, identify new business opportunities and stay one step 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.

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

Build Your Reputation And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche Or Industry

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

You are engaging 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 for 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 being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.

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

An expertly configured WordPress site can help establish your authority online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive visitors to your business.

(You can automatically syndicate your content on various social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress-driven website.)

Spy On Your Competition

Being able to monitor social media can help you discover and and perhaps also be inspired by the success strategies of authorities and thought leaders in your niche.

Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

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. Connecting with others through social media can increase your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

What About “Going Viral” Online?

Most 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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations 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, compelling, informative or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in the next section of this article can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many ways to create content with the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. For more info, 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 can generally be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being posted 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 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

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

If you or your 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 effects 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 discover 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 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 ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are still ignoring their online reputations.

Monitoring conversations and content on social media extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the reputation of individuals. For example, consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 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, you can still create a “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.

Managing digital reputation is becoming more important in the web economy.

We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer reviews. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which 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 announced online, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on Facebook, 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 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 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 information that other online users will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Section 1

In part 2 we explore WordPress tools and media tracking. To keep reading this article, click on this link: 29 Media Tools For Business Owners – Part 2

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