WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To succeed in today’s connected global and digital world, you need to build and nurture a social community around your brand, company, and products, based around actively “listening”.

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

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into your brand’s overall visibility on social media, assess competitor activity and market share, measure the impact of campaigns, avert crises, and identify potential market opportunities. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, brands, products, or topics.

As a business intelligence tool, social media monitoring is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various groups that include marketing professionals, digital reputation managers, market researchers, social engagement and community personnel, sales teams, and social media marketing agencies. Typically, smaller businesses don’t have the budget to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.

Fortunately a number of technology companies have developed tools and solutions to facilitate the tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict consumer behavior around your products or brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out.

Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media

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

For an overview of why WordPress is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: WordPress And Small Business – An Online Guide To Growing Your Successful Business With A WordPress Blog

Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore the new social business marketing opportunities.

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

Pitch Your Products And Services To The Right 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.

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

BuddyPress

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

This plugin allows you to set up a social network on your website, with member profiles, activity streams, messaging, user groups, and more.

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 regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.

WP Symposium

(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notification Bar
• User 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.

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels

With most social media tools, sharing and syndicating your content is very easy. There are services and 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 a considerable amount of time and money.

If you want to run most of your social marketing 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 encourage your site visitors to easily share your content online on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. For more information, check out the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute content across social channels with WordPress.

Market Research

Using social media monitoring tools allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new business 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.

Also, there are apps and tools that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many apps and tools will easily integrate with WordPress.

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

Building your business brand and reputation, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a 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 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 customer situation very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when the online community gets hold of the news.

Although social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online, it can also take up a lot of your time.

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

(You can automate your content syndication on various social media channels with an expertly configured WordPress website.)

Spy On Authorities In Your Niche

Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you observe and learn what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.

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 increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

“Go Viral” Online Faster

Many businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that are completely out of your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget 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, compelling, entertaining 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 set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created a free email training course that will show you how to create meaningful and engaging content. In this free course we also explore 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 – 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

Online Reputation Management

You have probably heard the term online reputation management. 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 is being said 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff 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 firms, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses 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 weakening the negative effects with an excess of positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do anything, 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 come in. If you Google your name or your business 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.

Companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they are not monitoring their online reputations effectively.

Monitoring conversations and posts on social media extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security-related departments. There’s also the online reputation of an average individual. Consider the scenarios below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 your job application.

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 deal with things in a timely manner.

Do you have an effective system for managing your online reputation in the online economy?

We’ve written an article about a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to legally and ethically manage user feedback. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

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 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 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 provides 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 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 website or business could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that other online users will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part 1

In the next section we explore 30 social media monitoring tools for WordPress. To read more, click here: WordPress And Social Media : Useful Tools For Measuring Social Performance – Part 2

***