Promoting your WordPress blog is essential to building readership and increasing search engine rankings. I have pulled together some of my favorite WordPress plugins that make managing your social media marketing efforts a little easier.
I have identified four main areas of social media marketing that you need to focus on:
- Automating your social media
- Promoting your social media profiles
- Sharing your WordPress Content
- Measuring Your Social Media Effectiveness
Promote Your Social Media Profiles
Make sure your site visitors can easily find your social media profiles by adding them to your website.
The Social Media Widget lets you add easily a sidebar widget with icons/links for your social media networks. Simple add your profile url for each service and the icon is added to your sidebar. The plugin has built in icons for 49 popular services but it also has the ability to add up to 6 of your own services. Choose from a few different icon styles or add your own.
Share your WordPress Content
Make it easy for your website visitors to share your content on popular social media sites.
Sharebar is another plugin that lets you add share buttons to your website but rather than showing up within each blog post or page, this plugin floats down the side of your website.
Measure Your Social Media Effectiveness
Have a way to measure your success and identify areas for improvement.
Social Metrics is a plugin that lets you measure your WordPress site’s performance on popular social networking sites and services. (Twitter, Facebook, Google +1, Google Buzz, StumbleUpon, Digg and LinkedIn) You can track how often each page /post is shared on the popular networks. This is a free plugin but there is a Pro version that unlocks some additional features. This tool can help you identify the social networks that are most actively sharing your content, so you can target your energy to the social networks that work best for your business.
If you have any questions about social media marketing and your WordPress blog, share them in the comments below.
