WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. To achieve business success in today’s highly connected digital world, you need to build an engaged community around your brand, services, and company, based around ”listening” to what they have to say.

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

Tracking social media activity allows you to find insights into what people are saying about your products, company, or brand on social media, help you take preventative measures against the spread of negative comments or feedback by dissatisfied customers, assess competitor activity, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and spot new market opportunities. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide vital data about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific businesses, topics, brands, or products.

As a business intelligence tool, being able to monitor activity on social media channels like blogs, forums, news sites, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, Medium, etc., message boards, video sites, and user-generated content (UGC) 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 groups that include PR companies, market research, marketing professionals, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and sales teams. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay social media monitoring professionals to continually track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately various technology providers have developed many tools that facilitate the active tracking of a wide range of social media channels, enabling you to identify consumer behavior around your brand or products allowing you to respond to conversations and engage with online users in a timely fashion.

In the article below, we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc.

Why Is WordPress An Ideal Platform For Social Media Marketing?

WordPress is not only a powerful, flexible and really easy to use content publishing 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, go here: The Complete Guide To Growing A Small Business Using WordPress

Using some of the tools listed in the next section of this article and a WordPress site, you will be able to tap into 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 to market your business on social media.

Pitch Your Services And Products To A Wider Audience 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 photos from Instagram, Twitter cards, Facebook feeds, testimonials, surveys, polls … even optimize your article titles and descriptions for social networkign sites.

WordPress is not only ideal for social media as a content marketing tool, it can also be transformed into a full-blown social networking, using plugins like BuddyPress, WPSymposium, and others.

BuddyPress

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

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
• User Groups
• Friend Connections
• Online Forums
• Notifications
• Many Add-On Features

BuddyPress is often referred to 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 plugins that greatly extend the application.

WPSymposium Pro

(WP Symposium WordPress social networking plugin)

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

• Friends
• Activity Wall
• Private Messages
• Notification Bar
• Member Directory
• Groups
• Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

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

Share Your Content Across Many Channels

Many social media tools 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 run most of your social marketing from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only lets you publish content on your own domain, it also offers many great plugins that allow your site visitors to easily share your content online 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 automatically distribute content across social media networks using WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Using social monitoring tools allows you to listen to what your target audience wants, identify new trends and 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 your social networking sites.

Additionally, there are applications and tools that let you conduct surveys and polls online. Many tools can be easily integrated with WordPress.

Build And Strengthen Your Reputation And Brand

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

You are engaging 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 for 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 online and how you respond to other user’s comments and discussions is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer 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 a credible authority in your niche, it can also be extremely time-consuming.

An expertly configured WordPress-driven blog helps you establish your your expertise online, share great information with your clients and customers, and drive more visitors to your business.

(An expertly configured WordPress-driven site lets you automatically syndicate content across social media channels.)

Study Niche Authorities

Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you reverse engineer what experts and thought leaders 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. Connecting with others through social media channels can grow your revenue, get your name out there, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

Could Your Web Content “Go Viral” Online?

Many 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 cannot be controlled. Throwing loads of dollars at a clever marketing campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have achieved stratospheric viral success while large brands and corporations have failed.

In many cases, the best you can do is study and research your audience, and provide content that users 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 can help your content go viral, or at least help you run relatively inexpensive marketing campaigns.

We have created an email training course that shows you how to create useful and compelling 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 info, go here or subscribe using the form below:

Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Large Brands

(Social Media Monitoring – Not Just For Big Brands)

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

• Online Reputation Management (ORM)
• Monitoring Online Trends

Managing Your Digital Reputation

You have probably heard the term 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 high profile and even general individuals and brands to track what is being said about them online – especially if what is being posted is negative. No doubt you’ve heard the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they will tell 10 more people about it. Bad news travels fast. People or competing businesses 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 companies, reputation management is an issue that now affects many companies and individuals online.

If you or your brand’s image, 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 content, or restoring consumer trust and confidence.

Before you can do this, 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 yourself or your business/brand and spot a negative comment or review, you can then address the issue, e.g. post a response, contact the person directly, etc.

Many companies everywhere are currently ignoring opportunities to attract new customers and boost their revenues because they are still ignoring their digital reputations.

Actively monitoring what is being said online extends beyond multinational brands, celebrities, and security agencies. The ability to monitor the online reputation of of an average individual is also important. For example, 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 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 a “set and forget” social media alert system, so that if anything about you does come up online later, you can act proactively and respond in a timely manner.

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

We’ve written an article about a WordPress plugin that can help to avoid the escalation of problem reviews about your products through effective customer review management. Go here for more details: Power Online Reviews – Customer Reviews Management Plugin For WordPress Users

Online Trend Monitoring

Regardless of which niche or industry you are in, there are always new and exciting things happening. New products, new services and new apps get released, events get scheduled and announced online, influential people say something controversial that gets mentioned in the news, companies release useful research data, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, something outdated gets updated, something becomes the next viral phenomenon on Facebook, 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 (how many news media channels now incorporate a segment on what’s trending on social media?)

Social media content is topical content. Posting regular 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 an authoritative 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 information that other online users will write about and post in their content.

This is the end of Part One

In the next section we explore dozens of social media tracking tools for WordPress users. To continue reading this article, click here: 30 Social Media Tracking Resources For Business Owners – Part Two

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