WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page on your website about your business or products is no longer enough. To achieve business success in today’s interconnected digital economy, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a social community around your company, brand, and products.

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

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

As a business intelligence tool, social 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 marketing teams, market researchers, digital reputation specialists, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay a media monitoring service to track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately a number of technology providers have developed a range of tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to identify and even predict consumer behavior around their products or brands so they can respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely manner.

In the article below, we explore several social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about.

WordPress And Social Media

WordPress is not just a powerful, flexible and extremely easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress 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 web site please see our related posts section.

Using some of the tools listed in this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to market your business effectively on social media and take advantage of new social 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.

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

The WordPress content management system (CMS) is not only ideal 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

(Run your own social networking website with BuddyPress plugin for WordPress)

This free WordPress plugin can be used to set up your own social networking community on your WordPress website.

BuddyPress is known 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 Pro

(WPSymposium WordPress social network plugin)

WPSymposium offers a strong support community and assistance for users who require professional help. Social features of the plugin include:

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

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

Share Your Content Across Many Channels

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

If you want to drive 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 many great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication across social media networks using WordPress.

Market Research

Using social tracking tools and services allows you to discover what consumers want, identify new trends and 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 your social network pages.

Also, many apps and tools are available that let you run surveys online. Many applications will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Reputation And Brand Online

Building and strengthening your business reputation and brand, showcasing your special talents, or establishing your expertise online requires commitment and a solid social marketing strategy.

You are engaging with real people, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on the needs of your target audience, and listen to their conversations for 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 comments and discussions is very important. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation or customer complaint very poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision when their response or behavior gets circulated online.

Social media lets you be seen and known on many different channels. This can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, but it can also be very time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress site 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 clients and customers, and drive new visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress website to automatically distribute content on various social channels.)

Spy On Your Competition

Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and even reverse engineer the success strategies of experts and influencers in your niche.

Explore Networking Opportunities And Joint Ventures, 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 grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to potentially lucrative new ventures.

“Going Viral” Online Faster

Many businesses would love to see their content or marketing campaigns go viral. “Going viral,” however, is a difficult outcome to achieve, as it relies on many factors that cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of money at a advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while large and well-funded campaigns have failed dismally.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, 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 Two of this article could help your content go viral, or at least help you create relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We provide an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling content. In this course we also discuss many ways to create content that has the potential to go viral and help your business grow faster. To learn more, 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 activities can be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management

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 many individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being said is negative. No doubt you’ve heard it said before that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing companies could be posting negative things online about you or your brand and if this goes unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of PR firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses and individuals online.

If you or your brand’s 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 effects with positive content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can begin to stop negative things being said about you or your brand from spreading further, 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 come in. If you Google your name 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 everywhere are currently missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and grow their business because they are not monitoring their digital reputations effectively.

Actively monitoring conversations and new posts on social media extends beyond large corporations, celebrities, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the online reputation of individuals. Consider the following situations:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody dispute 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 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” social media alert system, so that if anything does come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.

Do you have an digital reputation management strategy in place for your business?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of negative reviews about your business, products or services through effective customer review management. To learn more, visit this page: Power Online Reviews – Customer Feedback Management Plugin For WordPress Users

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate 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, something becomes the next viral phenomenon 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 (have you noticed how all news media broadcasters now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Posting regular topical 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 site or brand could even end up becoming a topical, or newsworthy source of information that other online users will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In the next section we explore media tools for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: 30 Media Resources That Can Help Grow Your Business Online – Part 2

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