WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” audiences online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected global and digital world, you need to build and engage with a social community around your brand, company, and services and “listen”.

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

Tracking social media activity allows you to gain insights into your brand’s online visibility on social media, spy on the competition, spot market opportunities, measure the impact of campaigns, and take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied users. It can also provide you with vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands, businesses, or products.

As a tool for business intelligence, being able to track social activity on social media channels like blogs, internet forums, social networking platforms, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, etc., discussion groups, 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, often carried out by a cross-section of groups that include digital reputation specialists, marketing teams, market research, social engagement and community staff, social media marketing agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, many small businesses do not have the budget to pay media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the media.

Fortunately many technology providers have developed tools that facilitate the tracking of a broad spectrum of social media channels, enabling you to identify and even predict what is being said online about your brand so you can respond proactively to conversations and interact with consumers in various social media platforms.

In the article below, we explore a number of social media measurement tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business,etc.

Why WordPress Is An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing

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

To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

Using some of the tools listed here 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 for marketing your business on social media.

Pitch Your Products And Services To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks With WordPress

WordPress comes with 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 images from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your content for social networkign sites.

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

BuddyPress

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

BuddyPress lets you add a suite of social networking components to your website, such as:

• Member Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• User Groups
• Friend Connections
• Online 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 an active community of plugin developers who regularly contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium Pro

(WPSymposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Mail
• Notification Bar
• User Directory
• Groups
• 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 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 many social channels and manage your social media marketing campaigns from one central location, saving you considerable 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 makes available a number of great plugins that encourage users to share your content online on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about social media sharing plugins for WordPress and our comprehensive article series on how to automate content syndication across social channels using WordPress.

Market Research

Using social tools and services allows you to listen to what consumers want, identify new business opportunities and stay 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.

Additionally, there are many tools that let you run surveys online and help you create consumer-driven sales campaigns. Many tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.

Strengthen Your Business Reputation And Brand

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

You are engaging with real people online, 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 and how you respond online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a situation poorly and end up being the subject of much scorn and derision as soon as their response or behavior gets circulated online.

Although social media can make it easier for others to see you as an authority in your niche, it can also be extremely demanding on your time.

An expertly configured WordPress blog is an ideal platform for building your online reputation or brand. It helps you establish your your expertise online, showcase your talents, share great information with your customers and clients, and drive more visitors to your business.

(Use an expertly configured WordPress site to automate web content syndication on social channels.)

Study The Influencers

Being able to listen in to social media conversations allows you to observe and learn the success strategies of authorities and influencers in your niche.

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

Recruitment companies spend a lot of time nowadays researching social media and studying the 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 brand seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

“Go Viral” Faster

Most businesses would love to have a viral marketing campaign. “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 clever campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while large 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, informative or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in Part 2 of this article can 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 will show you how to create useful and compelling content for your readers. In this free 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 – Not Just For Large Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small)

In general, social media monitoring can be divided into two main groups:

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Tracking Online Trends

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

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 others are saying 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. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses could be posting negative things online about you or your business and if things go unchecked, this can seriously damage your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of public relations companies, reputation management is now an issue that affects many companies 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 weakening 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 come in. If you Google yourself or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or bad review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Companies around the world are ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and boost their revenues because they are not managing their digital reputations effectively.

Monitoring online conversations extends beyond worldwide brands, celebrities, and security-related departments. There’s also the online reputation of average individuals. Consider the situations below:

• A former spouse in the middle of an acrimonious divorce or child custody battle 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 help your case.

Even if you are just starting out, it’s good to create an easy “set and forget” alert system, so that if any conversations, comments or reviews about you do come up online later, you can act proactively and deal with the situation in a timely manner.

How good is your reputation online?

We’ve written an article about a simple plugin for WordPress users that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your services through effective customer review management. More info: Power Online Reviews – Client Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of what niche or industry you operate 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, something goes viral 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 (have you noticed how all news sites 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 online users will write about and mention in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In part two we explore social media tools that can help grow your business online. To continue reading this article, click here: WordPress Social Media Measurement : Useful Tools – Part Two

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