WordPress & Social Media Tools – 1

The days of passively talking “at” your audience online are well and truly over. Putting up a static page about your company is no longer enough. To succeed in today’s interconnected world, requires actively “listening” to your audience and building an engaged community around your brand, company, and products.

Social media channels create a direct line of communication between your company and consumers and give anyone with an Internet connection direct access to the latest information around your products or services.

Social media monitoring allows you to gain insights into your company’s overall visibility on social media, identify opportunities for engagement, spy on your competitors, measure the impact of your marketing campaigns, and avert disasters. Additionally, social media monitoring can also provide you with vital information about emerging trends and what clients and consumers think about specific businesses, topics, brands, or products.

As a business intelligence tool, the ability to monitor social media is invaluable. Using social media monitoring as a form of business intelligence, however, is a complex undertaking, often carried out by various people including marketing professionals, online reputation management companies, market research, social engagement and community staff, agencies, and professional sales reps. Typically, small businesses do not can’t afford to pay a social media monitoring service to track their coverage in the and actively monitor their online reputation.

Fortunately many technology providers have developed tools that facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels, allowing companies to track what customers, competitors, supporters, and critics are saying about their products or brands so they can react to conversations and engage with online users in various social media platforms.

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

WordPress And Social Media

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

For an overview of why WordPress is the vehicle that can help you achieve your online business goals, go here: Using WordPress To Grow A Successful Small Business Online

Using some of the tools listed in Part Two 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 makes an ideal platform for marketing your business on social media.

Pitch Your Services And Products To An Audience Of Buyers On Your Social Networks 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 various social networkign sites.

The WordPress CMS platform 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 network with BuddyPress WordPress plugin)

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

• Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Private Messages
• 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 boasts a thriving community of plugin developers who contribute new open source plugins that greatly extend the platform.

WPSymposium

(WPSymposium 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
• User Directory
• Groups
• Online Forum
• Photo Galleries
• Chat
• RSS Feeds

WPSymposium lets you work with the theme you have. You can add features to your 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 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 strategy from WordPress, you can. WordPress not only makes it easy to publish content on your own domain, it also makes available a number of great plugins that encourage your site visitors to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. See the article we’ve written about WordPress social media sharing plugins and our comprehensive article series on how to automatically distribute your web content on various social media networks with WordPress.

Social Media – Great For Researching Your Market

Social media tracking tools and applications allow you to listen to what your market wants, identify new trends and 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.

Also, there are many tools that let you run surveys online. Many of these apps can be easily integrated with WordPress.

Build Your Brand And Credibility Online

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

You are engaging with real people online, and so your interactions must be authentic and meaningful. Focus on your target audience, 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 online is very important, and can make or break your reputation online. Everyday we hear horror stories of brands that handle a customer situation very poorly and end up suffering heavy losses when the online community gets hold of the news.

Although social media lets you be seen and known everywhere, it can also take up a lot of your time.

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

(Use an expertly configured WordPress-driven website to automate content syndication across various social media channels.)

Spy On Authorities In Your Niche

Being able to monitor social media conversations can help you discover and even reverse engineer what thought leaders 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. Connecting with others through social media can grow your revenue, get your business seen, and lead to new lucrative ventures.

Could Your Web Content “Go Viral”?

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 campaign is no guarantee of viral success. Many ridiculous memes have become internet viral hits while big-budget and well-funded campaigns 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, engaging, entertaining or even funny, that they will be naturally motivated to share with others.

Some of the tools listed in the next section 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 shows you how to create meaningful and engaging content for your readers. In this course we also discuss many 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 – Useful For All Businesses, Big And Small

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

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

• Online Reputation Management
• Online Trend Monitoring

Managing Your Digital Reputation

You have probably heard about online reputation management (ORM). 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 the saying that when someone has a bad experience with a product or service they tell 10 other people about it. Real or imagined, bad news travels fast. People or competitors could be posting negative stuff online about you or your business and if left unchecked, this can do some serious damage to your reputation.

Originally an aspect of the services of public relations firms, reputation management is an issue that now affects many businesses 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 reducing 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 yourself or your business/brand name and a negative comment or bad review comes up, you can then do something about it, e.g. post a response, contact the website or person directly, etc.

Businesses everywhere are currently ignoring opportunities to create happier customers and grow their business because they are not managing their online reputations effectively.

Monitoring what is being said online extends beyond worldwide corporations, celebrities, movie stars, famous musicians, and security-related agencies. It’s also important to be able to monitor the reputation of average individuals. Consider the following situations:

• A former spouse in the middle of a bitter 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 the things you have listed in your job application.

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, you can act proactively and deal with things in a timely manner.

Do you have an effective online reputation management strategy?

We’ve written an article about a simple yet effective WordPress plugin that lets you legally and ethically manage user feedback. See this page to learn more: Power Online Reviews – WordPress Plugin For Easy Customer Reviews Management

Tracking Online Trends

Regardless of what 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 promoted, influential people get mentioned in the news, companies release useful information, new videos are published containing fantastic tips or ideas, an outdated fact gets updated and becomes relevant again, 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 provides you with an endless source of new content (how many news sites 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 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 Section 1

In the next section we explore great social media resources for business owners. To continue reading this article, click here: Essential Social Media Measurement Tools For WordPress – Part Two

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