WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a web page with static information about your company and services is not enough. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected global economy, you need to build and engage with a social community around your company, brand, and products and “listen”.

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

Social media monitoring allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or products on social media, take preventative measures if you detect negative comments or feedback by disgruntled customers, measure the impact of campaigns, identify opportunities for engagement, and spy on the competition. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients are thinking about specific topics, businesses, products, or brands.

As a tool for business intelligence, being able to monitor social media channels like blogs, forums, wikis, micro-blogging platforms, message boards, video/photo sharing websites, and user-generated content is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, typically carried out by various people including market researchers, online reputation management (ORM) companies, marketing professionals, social media marketing agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses don’t have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed tools and solutions that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what consumers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about their products or brands allowing them to respond to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.

In this article, we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.

Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not just a powerful, scalable and very easy to use content publishing 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.

To learn more about why the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, see this article: Using WordPress To Grow Your Business Online

With a WordPress site and some of the tools listed in this article, 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 is an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Promote Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for various social networks.

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

BuddyPress

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

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
• 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new plugins that greatly extend the application.

WPSymposium

(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Mail
• Notifications
• User Directory
• Groups
• Online Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Share Your Content Across Many Social Channels

With most social media tools, syndicating content has never been easier. There are services and tools that let you compose, schedule and broadcast your content over multiple social channels and manage your social media 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 lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers a number of great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically syndicate your web content across social media with WordPress.

Market Research

Social media tools and services allow you to discover what consumers want, identify new opportunities and stay one step 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 networking sites.

Additionally, there are many tools that let you conduct surveys and polls of customers online. Many of these apps can be integrated with WordPress.

Build And Strengthen Your Credibility And Brand

Strengthening your reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your authority online requires commitment, dedication 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 to gain 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 and how you respond online is very important. Everyday we hear stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses 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 website is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your authority online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive new visitors to your business.

(Automate web content syndication on various social channels with an expertly configured WordPress website.)

Know What Your Competition Is Doing

Being able to listen in to social conversations allows you to observe and learn what thought leaders and influencers in your niche are doing.

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

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. Using social media can increase your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

What About “Going Viral”?

Most businesses would love to have a viral content marketing strategy. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget brands and corporations have failed dismally.

In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users will find so useful, compelling, entertaining or “spot-on”, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in Part 2 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 shows you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also explore 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 – 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
• Online Trend Monitoring

Online Reputation Management

You have probably heard of 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 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 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 things go unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

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

If you or your image, good name or good standing is being affected by negative material being posted online, you have to find a way of defeating the negative with an excess of 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 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 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.

Many companies around the world are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.

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

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter divorce or child custody battle 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 a lot of good, positive things published online either to support your job application.

Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.

Are you effectively ignoring your digital reputation?

We’ve written an article about a simple tool for WordPress users that can help you avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your services through effective user review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress

Predicting Online Trends

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 say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies publish useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated and becomes relevant again, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 can provide you with an endless source of new content and new content ideas (have you noticed how all news media agencies 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 people will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part 1

In the next section we explore WordPress social media measurement resources. To continue reading this article, click here: Social Media Tracking Resources For WordPress Users – Part 2

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