WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. It’s not enough to put up a page on your website with static information. To succeed in today’s highly connected global economy, you need to build and nurture a social community around your brand, company, and products and ”listen” to their needs and feedback.

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

Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, avert disasters, spot potential opportunities for engagement, measure the impact of campaigns, and spy on your competitors. It can also provide vital information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.

As a business intelligence tool, being able to track social media 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 digital reputation management companies, marketing professionals, market research, sales teams, social engagement and community personnel, and agencies. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately various providers have created affordable tools to facilitate the tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing you to identify consumer behavior around your brand so you can respond to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns.

WordPress – An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

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 the WordPress platform is a vehicle that every business owner needs to know about, go here: The Business Owner’s Guide To Using WordPress

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

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

Pitch Your Services And Products To The Right Audience On Your Social Media 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, Pinterest and many others.

For example, there are plugins that can add social sharing buttons, forums, add photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, 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 marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-featured social network, using WordPress plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

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

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 Messages
• 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 plugins that greatly extend the application.

WPSymposium

(WPSymposium Pro WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messaging
• Notifications
• Member 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.

Syndicate Your Content Across Many Channels

Many social media platforms let you get your information out to a wider audience, leverage multiple social channels simultaneously, build your online presence and manage all of your social marketing strategy from one central location with with ease.

If you want to manage 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 plugins that allow your site visitors to share your web content on Facebook, Twitter, 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 automatically syndicate your content across various social networks using WordPress.

Market Research

Social tools allow you to discover what your audience wants, identify trends and new 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 network pages.

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

Build Your Business Credibility And Brand

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

You are engaging 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 and how you respond to comments and discussions online is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up paying a heavy price when the online community finds out about it.

Social media provides many new channels for gaining wider exposure online. This can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, but it can also be extremely demanding on your time.

An expertly configured WordPress site lets you build your expertise online, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.

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

Study Authority Sites In Your Niche

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

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

It’s no secret that 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 can increase your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

Could Your Web Content “Go Viral”?

Most businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is quite difficult to achieve, as it relies on many factors that you cannot control. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever or cute advertising 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 study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 Part Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you set up relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created an email training course that will show 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 details, go here or subscribe using the form below:

Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Businesses

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Global Businesses)

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard of 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 if what is being posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. People or competing businesses 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 work of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many businesses and individuals online.

If you or your 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 an excess of positive material, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do this, 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 your name or your business/brand 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 person directly, etc.

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

Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond global corporations, celebrities, and security-related agencies. There’s also the online reputation of individuals. For example, 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 the things you have listed in 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 about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with it in a timely manner.

Do you have an effective strategy for managing your online reputation?

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

Analyzing Online Trends

Regardless of what niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting 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 research data, 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 Twitter, 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 (how many news media outlets now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 could end up referring you to others on social media, and who knows … your site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other people will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Section 1

In the next section we explore WordPress social media tracking and tools. To read the rest of this article, click here: Top Media Resources Every WordPress User Should Know About – Part Two

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