Trying to be successful in social media marketing is a tricky business. The subtle nuances involved in getting people to share your content en masse are extremely difficult to master and one must be very imaginative to go viral on Twitter or Facebook.
Having said that, the actual ongoing actions required to facilitate successful social media interaction with your WordPress site can be fully automated with no negative side effects. Every new post should be shared on your social media profiles automatically, your content should be easily shared by visitors, and you should be able to analyze your most successful content without resorting to manual data collection.
In this post I want to recommend the three WordPress plugins for social networks that you need to make the above become fact. With these plugins installed, the interaction with social networks will be fully automated so that you can focus on the important aspects to increase your popularity on social networks.
1. NextScripts Social Media Auto Poster (SNAP)
You almost certainly have a Facebook and Twitter profile and you may have many others. Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr… the list goes on. As such, posting your new content to all of your social media profiles can be more than a little tedious.
Luckily, there is an automated solution. Smart acronym aside, SNAP is the answer to the tedious task of posting new content on your blog on your social networks. It enables you to connect your blog to a large number of social networking websites and automatically post new content to their profiles when it is published on your site.
The SNAP configuration screen.
As you can see, it is possible to customize the message that is sent along with your updates; You can include dynamic tags that will be replaced with the title, description, permalink, and more. of the publication.
For some of the social networks, you have options about how the updates should be displayed. Here's an example courtesy of Facebook:
You can ask SNAP to post updates to Facebook in any of the three formats listed above.
The one-time investment required to set up SNAP pays for itself over and over again as you publish posts to your WordPress site. You will never have to worry about promoting your content through your social networks again, as it will be done for you.
Even though SNAP may not act as a replacement for your personal participation in your social media profiles (of course, it should always be active and responsive), make allow you to fully automate the process of promoting new content. Arguably this should give you plus time to interact with others and further promote your social media profiles and blogs by other means that are not so easily automated.
2. Digg Digg
Once you've resolved to promote posts through your social media profiles, it's time to move on to allowing visitors to easily share your content through your social media profiles. own self social media profiles. Although there are a host of plugins available that can do this, I always refer to Digg Digg as my number one pick.
This plugin has been in development for years and was purchased by the good folks at Buffer last year. Your participation has been a huge benefit to the continued development of the plugin and users can now enjoy a robust and highly functional social sharing plugin.
In my opinion, the best feature of Digg Digg is the floating action bar. Here's an example in action from my own blog:
(*3*)
This bar will track to follow the visitor's movement so that the sharing option is never out of sight. Digg Digg gives you complete control over the location of the bar and at the same time the options for sharing on the social networks it has in mind (the list of available social networks is stupendously complete).
But that's not all: Digg Digg at the same time enables you to place share buttons at the beginning and end of posts if that's your preferred location:
The plugin uses lazy loading, which means that it will not slow down the loading of any other items on your site. When it comes to resource-intensive social media items, this is a fantastic option. Simply put, Digg Digg works amazing and looks wonderful at the same time.
3. WP Social Stats
At this stage you should be pretty well prepared. The content is published automatically on all of your social media profiles and it has made it much easier for visitors to share your content with their own followers. At this stage, the next logical step is to equip yourself with the kind of data that can help you analyze the popularity of individual posts in terms of social shares. With this type of information you can shape your future content strategy to publish content that attracts more actions.
The best plugin I have found for that purpose is WP Social Stats. It can provide you with an overview of social sharing statistics for all your blog posts. The advantages of this should be obvious: it enables you to see exactly how each of your posts has performed on individual social media (and in total). This type of information can help you understand the type of content that is popular (or not) on your site.
Setting up WP Social Stats is a breeze - once you've installed the plugin, you'll need to update the social stats for each of your blog posts. Once this is done, you will be able to see the social sharing statistics for each published post.
The options within WP Social Stats are simple but very effective. For starters, you can filter the post by category so that you can see which posts are most popular for each section of your site. At the same time you can switch between posts and pages by including social sharing buttons on the pages. Each results table can be sorted by social network so you can see which posts were shared the most by network. At the same time you can sort by total number of shares on all networks:
I'm sure you can clearly see the benefits of this plugin. It gives you the kind of information that would otherwise require tedious manual work to discover. At the same time, I would say that in the right niches, social sharing stats are the most reliable popularity marker. A human being who chooses to share content is a much more powerful action than simply clicking a link on a search engine's results page, for example.
Careful analysis of the statistics produced by WP Social Stats and future actions based on that analysis can make a big difference in the growth of your blog.
The domain of social networks is at your fingertips ...
As I said at the beginning of this post, mastering social media is tough.
Basically, it involves understanding how your target audience thinks and how they will react to the content you post. But you can make the process much easier by automating what can be easily automated and equipping yourself with the information that enables you to make informed decisions about your future content strategy.
With the above three social media WordPress plugins, you are well on your way to much greater success with social media. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for alternative plugins, please do shoot in the comment section below!
