WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

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

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

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your brand, company, or products on social media, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, spy on the competition, spot market opportunities, and be alerted to impending crises. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what clients and consumers are thinking about specific products, brands, businesses, or topics.

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, typically carried out by a cross-section of people including market researchers, marketing professionals, online reputation management (ORM) agencies, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and agencies. Typically, small businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately various providers have developed affordable tools that facilitate the active tracking of a variety of social media channels, enabling you to track what is being said online about your products or brand allowing you to respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.

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

WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and very easy to use content management platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, it also integrates fully with many social media applications, allowing you to easily grow your online presence in the social realm.

For an overview of why the WordPress platform is the vehicle that can help you achieve your business goals online, see this article: Understanding WordPress – The Business Owner’s Guide

Using some of the tools listed in 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 makes 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 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 networks.

WordPress is not only great for social media as a content publishing and marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking site 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:

• 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.

WP Symposium Pro

(WP Symposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

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

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

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

Syndicate Your Content Across Many 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 lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many plugins that allow your site visitors to easily 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 on social media networks using WordPress.

Market Research

Using social media tools and services allows you to discover what your audience wants, identify new opportunities and stay one step 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.

Also, many tools are available that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales funnels. Many of these apps and tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.

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

Building your business brand and reputation, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment, patience 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 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 situation or customer complaint poorly and end up paying a heavy price as soon as 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 is an ideal platform for building your reputation or brand online. It lets you build authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.

(You can automate your web content syndication across various social media channels using an expertly configured WordPress-driven site.)

Study Niche Authorities

Being able to listen in to social media conversations can help you reverse engineer what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.

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

It’s no secret that recruitment companies research social media 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 grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

What About “Going 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 are completely outside your control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large brands and corporations have failed.

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, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in Part Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content. In this free course we also explore many ways to create content that has 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 Large Brands)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

Managing Your Digital Reputation

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 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 tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative material online about you or your business and if this goes 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 diluting the negative 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 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 yourself or your business/brand 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 all over the world are ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and retain existing ones because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-related departments. Being able to monitor the reputation of of individuals is also very important. For example, consider the scenarios below:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody proceedings 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 an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.

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

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

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which niche or industry you are 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 publish useful information, new presentations are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 (how many news media outlets now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Implementing a regular schedule of posting 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 content that other online users will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Section 1

In part 2 we explore 30 social media resources for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Tools For Social Media Tracking – Part 2

***