WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected world, you need to build a social community around your company, brand, and services and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.

Social channels create a direct line of communication between your business and your audience and give anyone with an Internet connection instant access to the latest information around your products or services.

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, services, or brand on social media, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of campaigns, help you take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by online users, and spot potential opportunities for engagement. It can also provide you with valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, brands, topics, or products.

As a tool for business intelligence, social media monitoring 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 market research, digital reputation management (ORM) companies, marketing professionals, sales teams, social marketing agencies, and social engagement and community staff. Typically, many small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their digital reputation.

Fortunately many technology providers have developed many affordable tools to facilitate the active monitoring of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to identify and even predict what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about your brand or products so you can respond to conversations and engage with consumers in various social media platforms.

In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out.

WordPress And Social Media

WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible 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.

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

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed here, 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 provides 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for 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 completely transformed into a full-blown social network, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

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

BuddyPress is a free plugin for WordPress that lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messaging
• User Groups
• Friend 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.

WPSymposium Pro

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social network plugin)

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

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

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels

With most social media platforms, syndicating content has never been easier. There are tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you 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 makes available many plugins that allow users to 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 automate your content syndication across social networks using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Market Research

Using social tools allows 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 your social pages.

Additionally, many apps and tools are available that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many of these apps will integrate with WordPress.

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

Building your reputation and brand, showcasing your talent, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid 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 to gain 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 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 horror stories of brands that handle a situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.

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

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

(You can automate web content syndication across various social media networks with an expertly configured WordPress website.)

Spy On Authorities In Your Niche

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

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, Find Affiliates, Recruit Talented Staff, etc.

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. Connecting with others through social media channels can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?

Most 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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while big-budget brands 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, engaging, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide a free email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free course we also discuss 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)
• Online Trend Monitoring

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard about online reputation management (ORM). 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what others are saying 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 businesses 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 services of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now 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 diminishing the negative impact with an excess of 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 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 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.

Many companies are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and increase their revenues because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.

Actively monitoring online conversations extends beyond well-known brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security agencies. The ability to monitor the reputation of of average individuals is also very important. 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” 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.

How good is your reputation online?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage customer reviews. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy User Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress

Analyzing Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New apps get released, new services get launched, 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, something outdated 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 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. Posting regular topical content with additional 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 website or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of content that others will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In part 2 we explore WordPress and social media and useful social measurement tools. To read the rest of this article, click here: Social Media Resources For WordPress Users – Part 2

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