10 Winning WordPress Social Media Strategies

Nowadays any 6 year old can tell you what Facebook, Instagram or Twitter is. Today’s workforce grew up alongside the modern web. They are expert users who intuitively navigate the internet having been connected the majority of their lives. Just about everyone is on some sort of social media platform for shopping, dating, sharing, connecting with friends or networking. We all know that social media has had a tremendous value and impact in modern society. Just how valuable is it? And how can you leverage social media to help gain more visibility?

Social media sites connect people that share common interests. Since the advent of social sharing sites, many causes have been won and addressed thanks to grassroots campaigns that started with nothing more than a single Facebook page. Many of today’s largest global political and social movements such as the Arab Spring can be largely attributed power of sharing through social media. Facebook alone has transformed from a place to connect with friends into an all-purpose boon to find jobs, advertise products, and push political agendas among other things. Juggernauts like Facebook and Twitter are here to stay so it’s important that you understand how to leverage these powerful marketing channels.

Social Media Marketing Strategies

A lot of SEO strategists don’t take as much advantage of social media as they should because they believe it won’t affect search engine results. To brush on the fundamentals of good SEO, check out our article on SEO Basics for WordPress. If you aren’t participating in social media networks, blogging and creating forums within these communities, you are missing out bigtime. When I search through googles search engine “Qualcomm” the 4th result is their Facebook page. There are many social media marketing strategies that can increase your websites presence and SEO ranking in turn. We have 10 winning strategies to help you maximize the use of the biggest social media channels. 

1. Market within social media channels, you will need to take a bit of a different approach than other more familiar marketing campaigns. It’s different than the steps you need to for SEO. Following are some tips and strategies to help you make the best of your social media presence.
2. Make sure you update your website with fresh content available for users on social network. It’s important to have things that are interesting for your target audience. This will increase the likelihood of people sharing links to your site. Stale or repetitive content can turn people off. It’s a good idea to blog daily or as often as possible.
3. Make your content easy to share across platforms. If you make your content in many forms, you will increase the chances of sharing. Increase the ability to share your sites content by making it available in pdf, audio, video and optimizing it for any device.
4. Become a valuable resource. Share your knowledge and wisdom. The users of today expect you to provide information that is useful. If you can become an authority that users trust you will be rewarded with a solid audience who respects and trusts your site. This can increase your clout and be very lucrative.
5. Be genuine. People on social networks can spot phonies from a mile away. Don’t try to mislead or trick your audience. They will eventually chew you up and spit you out. If you are genuine and post content that you know, you’ll get much further than you will a fake persona.
6. Make sharing, tagging and bookmarking easy. If you have a blog or rss feed to share, make it really simple to generate embed codes, tags, or bookmarks. By adding buttons you can make things easy for users.
7. Content is king. There it is again…that annoying phrase. Yes it’s played out but it still rings true. If you make it a point to make unique and interesting content you will get more visitors because they will look to you for fresh articles. Don’t be afraid to be bold and try new things. Use your creativity to stand out from the pack.
8. Reward your users. The more the merrier, teamwork makes the dream work, many hands make light work…all of these apply here. The most valuable resource you have are helpful and loyal users. Offering those users perks can ensure they continue to be helpful.
9. Stay Involved. You need to share your thoughts and opinions on social media to gain trust and acceptance. You will not be welcome for long if you don’t participate, nulling your chances at leveraging any resources.
10. Know your audience. Social media can be brutal, especially if you convey the wrong message. Many celebrities and professional athletes have lost their jobs as a result of a lynching in the court of public opinion. Respect the rules and guidelines of the communities you participate in, and take some time to get to know them.
11. Make wise choices. You need to be careful about what social media strategy you employ. It can be a great market tool or a great destroyer of reputations and trust. It can be hard to repair the damage a disastrous social media campaign can bring to your business or cause. This is why you should spend time considering your strategy and getting to know your audience.

Measuring Results

If you are going to make an effort to participate in social media, you will want to measure your progress. Before you can do that you’ll need to know what your goals are. You may want to increase website traffic, get more conversions, build your brand or break into a new market. You need to have a clear definition of your goals so you can measure your success against them.

Obviously you will want to measure your website traffic. If traffic increases, then your efforts are yielding results. There are several things that you can measure to understand your visitors better. You should have a blog for your site and track your readers. There are many plugins available for WordPress that you can use to analyze the traffic of your website. You can see where your visitors are located, how much time they spend on your page, if they are clicking your links and more.

If you have a blog, you should definitely have a comments section as well as a forum for discussions. If you don’t have those two things, you are going to lose out on a lot of social media value. Rss feeds, videos, gifs images and other rich content options will also help your cause. While search engine crawlers don’t pay attention to these, your visitors certainly will. With the right analytics plugin for WordPress, you can see how many people are subscribing to your RSS feeds, twitter, or Facebook page. The number of subscribers or followers you have is a good indicator of how many people you are reaching. Remember that you can also keep track of who is linking to your site. The main thing you want to keep track of is how many people you can build relationships with. The higher that number the more successful you will be.

There’s a lot of great plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast, All-In One SEO Pack and Premium SEO Pack that can help you optimize your site for social media sharing and other SEO techniques. This plugin is an industry leader that delivers trusted results. We use it here at Looks Awesome and were are pretty happy with it. You can optimize your site for search engines as well as social media sites. Yoast has some great tools for measure and optimizing how you share to Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Additionally there are a lot of other great analytic tools you can use within WordPress to manage your social media.

Conclusion

Social media is ubiquitous in today’s online world, news is instantaneous and it’s hard to walk down the street without seeing someone posting a picture for Instagram, or tweeting on from their cell phone. Having a solid social media strategy can boost your visibility, increase back-links and ultimately raise your search engine rankings. Remember, you will need to genuinely participate in your social community and it’s not something that can be faked. The only way to really integrate your site into a social network is to become part of that network. If you can make that happen, the rewards are much better than a mass email campaign or ppc marketing plan. There are plenty of great SEO plugins for WordPress and lots of ways to measure the success of your social media campaigns. Do some research and begin sharing to get your site on the map.