Social Media Marketing Basics for Your WordPress Website

Social media is a proven way to get more visitors to your website. This in turn helps you generate more leads, sales, and business from your WordPress site – something we all want from our online presence right?

 

Whether your website is new or established, now has never been a better time to leverage the power of social media to grow your audience. Even if you think you’ve already taken care of social media optimization for your WordPress site, with new platforms popping up all the time, there is always more you can do.

 

Not only does social media gives you more channels to find and interact with your target audience, if you set up your WordPress website correctly, you can build an army of fans who are willing to share your content and spread the message of your brand simply because they love your content and what you have to offer.

 

How to Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Website Audience

 

However, updating your website and blog can be hard enough, let alone building a social media presence. Where do people find the time to be constantly tweeting and posting and pinning high-quality content on social media? This article is going to share some helpful tools and plugins for WordPress users that will help you keep on top of the social media whirlwind.

 

These solutions were designed to save you time, help you interact with your audience more, and to better promote your site, brand and business online. Implementing just one or two of these methods should help you start growing the number of visitors to your website, giving you more opportunities to convert against your goals, whatever they may be.

 

Make Your Content Easily Shareable

 

It is no longer enough to write great content for your site. People are writing great content on sites everywhere, so how can you stand out? To make it easy for your target audience to find your content, read it, and then come back for more you need to be promoting your site on the most appropriate social media networks.

 

Social Sharing Buttons

Having highly visible social sharing buttons on your site can make a massive difference to how often your content gets shared, which in turn affects your site’s traffic levels. By adding these buttons, your visitors can click on them to share your content with their friends and followers in an instant.

 

These buttons can also encourage your visitors to check out your own profiles and decide whether to follow you on social media. This gives you another opportunity to connect with your audience and turn one-time visitors into repeat readers.

 

The Best Social Sharing Buttons Plugins for WordPress

 

 

A great free WordPress plugin that adds social sharing buttons to your site is Social Media Feather. This plugin displays attractive social sharing and follow buttons to each piece of content on your site. This will encourage people to instantly share an article as they finish reading it.

 

Create Tweetable Quotes 

 The WordPress plugin Click to Tweet is another great tool that can increase how often your content gets shared. It allows you to embed quotes in your articles that your readers can tweet to their followers in just one click. If you choose the right quotes from your content to become clickable tweets, when they show up in someone’s timeline they will pique their interest and draw them to your site.

 

Show Off Your Follower Counts

 

 

 If you are looking for a social sharing plugin with a bit of an edge then you want to get Socialbox. This shows your visitors just how popular you are and gives your site extra credibility and social proof. People are also more likely to join you on social media if they can see you already have many followers and are actively engaging with them there. 

The Importance of Shareable Images

 

Images are a crucial part of a successful social media campaign. People are now more likely to view and read a social media post that contains eye-catching images. This visual content can also increase the chances of your audience sharing your blog posts or social media messages on their own channels. If an image looks good on your site, then there is a good chance they will be happy to leverage it to enhance their own social media feed.

 

Each post that you publish, whether on your blog or your social media channels must include interesting and relevant images. If people enjoy your content and the images are a reflection of that content, they will be more likely to share them. Equally, if someone sees an image on social media that immediately grabs their attention then there is a higher chance of them checking out the accompanying article or re-posting that message to their followers.

 

Make it Easy to Share Your Images

 

 

 If you have an image heavy website then you will want to be sharing these images on Pinterest. To make sharing your images quick and easy for your visitors you need to install the free Pinterest ‘Pin It’ plugin. This free plugin will add a ‘pin it’ button to each image so if somebody wants to pin the picture to their Pinterest wall all they need to do is click. This is a great way to get your images shared on Pinterest and increase traffic to your site. 

 

If you want even more options for making your images shareable then the powerful Monarch from Elegant Themes is a premium social sharing plugin for WordPress you should check out. Monarch offers some excellent options for social sharing as well as a particularly easy and efficient way for people to share your images on a variety of social media platforms.

 

Once Monarch is set up, visitors to your site just need to hover over an image to view a selection of social share buttons. This image can then be shared on social media channels of your audience’s choice in just a few clicks. By getting your images shared in this way, you are again more likely to increase traffic to your site and generate leads.

 

Integrating Social Media on your Site

 

If you have lots of social interactions happening on your social platforms then it is important that you showcase these on your website. If your site visitors see that your social media has lots going on and is very popular then they will want to join the conversation.

 

By displaying your Instagram feed on your site, your Facebook wall, or your latest tweets, your audience will be able to quickly get a sense of what’s happening in your social network and make a decision whether to get involved or not.

 

Embed Feeds into Your WordPress Website

 

 Juicer is a newly released WordPress plugin that makes it easy embed your social media feeds into your site. You can install and use this plugin for free or upgrade to their premium plan for more features.

 

Not only does it promote your social media pages on your site, it also offers analytics on who is using your feed and how they are interacting with it. This helps you to see which social media platforms are most popular with your target audience and what you can do to optimize the promotion of your site.

 

Automating Social Media Sharing

 

Constantly tweeting, pinning and posting on social media channels is essential if you want a strong online presence. However, it is also extremely time-consuming as well as difficult to organise. Thankfully, there are a few tools out there that can help you automate these tasks and save you some time.

 

The Revive Old Post Pro plugin is one such tool that will save you plenty time and effort. This is thanks to its ability to repost old blog content to your social media networks of choice. This means that you no longer have to constantly write new content just to get attention from your followers.

 

Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about your old but still valuable content getting lost and forgotten. This plugin allows you to choose what type of articles you want posted on social media, how often, and where. While there is a free version of this plugin available, if you really want to automate your social media sharing efforts then it’s worth considering paying for the commercial version and seeing how much more traffic it can drive to your website.

 

 

 

An even more feature rich option for organizing your social media publishing is Hootsuite. This is a powerful solution for managing your social media marketing, offering extensive options for social sharing, analytics, and security, amongst many other things. With Hootsuite, you can also auto schedule your posts, enabling different content to be sent to a variety of social media platforms all at different times. This means you don’t have to be physically posting yourself, yet you can still reach your audience on the right social media channels at the right times. 

Final Thoughts

The options above are just a few of the many ways you can leverage social media to increase traffic to your WordPress website and hopefully generate more sales, revenue, or commissions. However, like most things in life, there is no one definitive answer when it comes to how to use social media effectively. Depending on the type you of site you have and your target audience what you need will differ. Take your time, trial different plugins and solutions and just see what works best for you.

 

How are you currently promoting your website on social media? What steps have you taken to automate this process? What sort of results have you seen from your efforts? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.