WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a page on your site with static information about your business is not enough. To succeed in today’s highly connected digital economy, you need to build and nurture a social community around your brand, services, and company and “listen”.

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

Monitoring social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s online visibility on social media, spy on your competitors, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and identify opportunities for engagement. Additionally, monitoring social media can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.

As a tool for business intelligence, social monitoring 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 market researchers, marketing teams, online reputation management companies, social engagement and community staff, professional sales reps, and agencies. Typically, smaller businesses do not can’t afford to pay a media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed many affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling companies to identify consumer behavior around their brands or products allowing them to react to conversations and engage with consumers in a timely manner.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth checking out and 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.

To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, 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.

Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Media Networks With WordPress

WordPress includes 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 feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for various social networks.

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

BuddyPress

(Run 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:

• Extended Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• User Groups
• Friendship Connections
• Online 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 boasts an active community of plugin developers who contribute new plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium

(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notifications
• Member Directory
• Groups
• Online 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.

Share Your Content Across Multiple Social Channels

Many social media tools let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your business presence online 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 makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available many great plugins that encourage users to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content on various social channels with WordPress.

Market Research

Using social media measuring tools and applications allows you to listen to what your market wants, identify new trends and opportunities and stay 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.

Additionally, many applications are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online and help you create customer-driven sales funnels. Many of these tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.

Build And Strengthen Your Brand And Online Reputation

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

You are trying to engage with real people online, and so your interactions must be meaningful and authentic. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as the online community gets hold of the news.

Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be extremely time-consuming.

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

(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you automate your web content syndication on various social channels.)

Study Niche Authorities

Being able to monitor social media can help you reverse engineer what the experts are doing.

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

Recruitment companies nowadays spend a lot of time 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. Using social media to explore new opportunities can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

“Go Viral” Faster

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 advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large 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, informative 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 create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content with 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 – Not Just For Large Businesses

(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Monitoring Online Trends

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

You have probably heard the term 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 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses 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 reducing the negative impact with positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do anything, 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

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

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond well-known corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. For example, consider the scenarios below:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 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 about you does come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

Do you have a system for managing your online reputation?

We’ve written an article about a plugin for WordPress users that lets you legally and ethically manage your customer feedback. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business 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 release useful research data, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 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 site 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 more than 27 social media measurement tools that can help grow your business online. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Tracking : Useful Tools – Part 2

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