WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to just put up a web page with static information. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, you need to grow, nurture and engage with a social community around your brand, company, and services, all based around “listening”.

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

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, be alerted to disasters, identify new opportunities for engagement, spy on your competitors, and measure the impact of campaigns. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific topics, businesses, brands, or products.

As a tool for business intelligence, the ability to track social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various groups that include online reputation management companies, marketing teams, market research, social marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately many technology companies have developed many tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing you to track consumer behavior around your brand so you can react to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.

In this article, we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out.

WordPress And Social Media – An Ideal Business Marketing Platform

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

To learn more about the benefits of 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 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.

Promote Your Products And Services 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 images from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networkign sites.

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

BuddyPress

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

Run your own social network on your website.

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 an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium Pro

(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)

WP Symposium provides a strong support community and assistance for members who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messages
• Notifications
• User Directory
• Groups
• Online Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels

With most social media tools, syndicating your content has never been easier. There are tools and services that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over many social channels and manage your social media marketing 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 lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many plugins that allow users to easily share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your web content on various social media channels using WordPress.

Market Research

Social monitoring tools and applications allow you to discover what your market wants, identify trends and new business opportunities and stay 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 those social networks.

Additionally, many applications are available that let you survey customers online. Many tools will easily integrate with WordPress.

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

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

You are engaging with real people, 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 comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as the online community finds out about it.

Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, but it can also be very time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress-driven website is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great content and strategies with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress site to automatically syndicate your web content across social media networks.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to monitor social media conversations allows you to reverse engineer what the experts 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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

What About “Going Viral”?

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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.

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, compelling, entertaining 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created an email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Tracking Online Trends

Managing Your Online 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 if what is being posted is negative. 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the work of PR companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies 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 impact with an excess of positive content, 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 name and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Many companies around the world are missing out on opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.

Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security departments. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of average individuals is also important. Consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious 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 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 does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.

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

We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that allows you to legally and ethically manage customer feedback. More info: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

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 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 goes viral on YouTube, 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (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 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 information that other people will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Part 1

In the next section we explore WordPress and social media and useful resources for measuring social metrics. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media Monitoring – Part Two

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