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 global and digital economy, you need to build and nurture an engaged community around your products, brand, and company, based around actively ”listening” to what they have to say.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and your 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 your company’s online visibility on social media, spot market opportunities, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spy on your competition. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific products, topics, brands, or businesses.

As a tool for business intelligence, social signal monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including PR companies, market researchers, marketing teams, sales teams, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community personnel. Typically, smaller businesses do not have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately various service providers have created a range of affordable and even free tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your brand allowing you to react to conversations and interact with consumers in a timely fashion.

In the article below, we explore several social media tracking tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc.

WordPress And Social Media

WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible 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 please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

Using some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the full power of social media.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why WordPress provides an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Promote Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social Networks With WordPress

WordPress comes with 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networkign sites.

The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only great for social media as a content publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, 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:

• Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• Extensible 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 an active community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium Pro

(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notifications
• User Directory
• Groups
• 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 Many Channels

With most social media platforms, syndicating content is very easy. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable time and money.

If you want to drive your social marketing strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also has a number of great plugins that allow users to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, 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 automate web content syndication across social media networks using WordPress.

Market Research

Use social tracking tools and services to listen to what consumers want, identify new trends and 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 pages.

Also, many apps and tools are available that let you run surveys online. Many applications can be easily integrated with WordPress.

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

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

You are trying to engage with real people, 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 comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated online.

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

An expertly configured WordPress-driven website helps you establish your authority online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress site to automate your web content syndication on social media networks.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you observe and even reverse engineer the success strategies of experts, authorities, and thought leaders in your niche.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

Could Your Content Be The Next Viral “Hit”?

Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult thing to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands have failed to take off.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, engaging, informative or even funny, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this course we also explore 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 – Not Just For Big Businesses

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Tracking Online Trends

Managing Your Digital Reputation

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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially negative comments, reviews, etc.. 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. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative material online about you or your brand and if left unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

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

If you or your brand’s image, good name or reputation is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of reducing the negative effects with positive material, 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 your name or your business/brand name and find that a competitor has published fake reviews or customer complaints designed to discredit your business, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Many companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.

Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the online reputation of an average individual. Consider the following situations:

• 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 help your case.

Even if you are just starting out, you can still create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if anything does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.

How well do you manage your online reputation?

We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your business, products or services through effective user review management. For more details, go here: Power Online Reviews – User Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products get released, new services get launched, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something goes viral on YouTube, 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 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 website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that others will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In part two we explore social media measurement resources for WordPress. To continue reading this article, click here: Top Social Media Monitoring Resources For WordPress Users – Part 2

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