WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve success in today’s highly connected digital world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building a community around your brand, services, and company.

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

Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into what people are saying about your company, brand, or services on social media, spy on the competition, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, be alerted to disasters, and identify market opportunities. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific brands, products, businesses, or topics.

As a tool for business intelligence, social signal monitoring 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 marketing professionals, digital reputation managers, market research, agencies, social engagement and community personnel, and professional sales reps. Typically, smaller businesses don’t can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately different technology providers have developed many tools that facilitate the tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, allowing companies to identify what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about their brands allowing them to respond proactively to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.

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

WordPress And Social Media Marketing

WordPress is not only a powerful, scalable and very easy to use CMS platform used by millions of businesses worldwide, WordPress also integrates fully with many social media applications, making it an ideal too for growing 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: WordPress For Small Business Owners – The Beginner’s Guide To Growing A Small Business With A WordPress Site

Using some of the tools listed here and a WordPress site, you will be able to explore full range of benefits offered by social media marketing.

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 Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Social Media 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 feeds, 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 publishing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social network site, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

(Run your own social networking site with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

BuddyPress allows you to set up a social networking community on your site, with member profiles, messaging, activity streams, user groups, and more.

BuddyPress is known as “social networking in a box.” You can turn features on and off to suit your needs and the plugin boasts an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the application.

WPSymposium Pro

(WP Symposium WordPress social network 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
• 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.

Syndicate Your Content Across Multiple Channels

Many social media platforms 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 drive your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of plugins that encourage users to share your web 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 automatically syndicate content across various social media networks using WordPress.

Conduct Market Research

Social media tools and services allow you to listen to what consumers want, identify trends and new business 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 those social networks.

Additionally, there are tools that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many of these apps will integrate with WordPress.

Build Your Credibility And Brand And Establish Authority In Your Niche

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

You are trying to engage with real people online, 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 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 stories of brands that handle a customer situation poorly and end up suffering heavy losses as soon as the online community finds out about it.

Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as a credible authority in your niche, industry, or area of expertise, it can also be extremely demanding on 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 great content and strategies with your customers and clients, and drive visitors to your business.

(An expertly configured WordPress blog lets you automatically syndicate content on various social channels.)

Spy On Authorities In Your Niche

Being able to monitor social media can help you observe and discover what authorities and influencers in your niche are doing right.

Explore Joint Venture Opportunities, 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. Using social media can grow your revenue, get your brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

Could Your Web Content “Go Viral”?

Many businesses would love to have a viral hit. “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 advertising is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have succeeded virally while big-budget brands and corporations have failed to take off.

In many cases, the best you can do is know your audience well, and provide content that users in your audience will find so useful, engaging, 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 run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created an email training course that will show you how to create useful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also discuss ways to create content with 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 – Not Just For Big Businesses

(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

Managing Your Online Reputation

You have probably heard about online reputation management. 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 negative comments, reviews, etc.. 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 stuff online about you or your brand and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, 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 diminishing the negative effects with an excess of positive material, 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 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 do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Companies all around the world are missing out on opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they ignore their digital reputations.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-conscious departments. There’s also the reputation of individuals. 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 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 any conversations about you do come up online, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

Do you know what users are saying about you online?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage customer feedback. More information: Power Online Reviews – Easy Customer Reviews Management For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate your business in, there are always new things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and promoted, 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 becomes the next viral phenomenon on social media, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (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 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 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 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 One

In part two we explore media tools for WordPress users. To read the rest of this article, click here: WordPress And Social Media Measurement – Part 2

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