Social Media is one of the most important tools for getting the word out about your blog.
Are you taking advantage of social WordPress plugins that help standardize, automate and streamline you post-production and promotion?
Jump Ahead to a Specific Section:
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is actually a plugin that helps with SEO, but it’s functionality crosses over into usefulness for social sharing, as well. Using Yoast, you can specify a social-specific image, title, and description, even if it differs from your markup for search engines.
Regardless, every blogger should install and use this plugin, regardless of if they care about social sharing or not. It’s that useful. More on that in a bit.
Share Buttons
If you have a blog, you’re cheating yourself out of free traffic if you don’t have built-in share buttons.
I don’t think any are particularly better than others, it really just depends on the style of your blog and the features you’re after. Here are a few standard recommendations tested and approved by many bloggers:
- Shareaholic (what I’m using as of this post being published)
- Jetpack Sharing (you may, and really should, already have Jetpack installed for other features)
- Floating Share Buttons by Buffer
Pin It Button
The Pin It Button allows you to embed a Pinterest-specific image into your post that’s not visible unless someone either clicks the “Pin It” button, uses the Pinterest browser extension, or uploads your blog post to Pinterest.
This is extremely useful, as Pinterest can be a huge traffic generator. Many use it as a social bookmarking website, both to save articles for later, and to find solutions to their current problems. Images optimized for Pinterest, as opposed to sharing a post with an image better formatted for Facebook, will drive through many more clicks and interest.
”Images optimized for Pinterest will drive through more clicks to your blog.”
Maddy Osman Tweet
Another consideration for Pinterest is the ability to create rich pins. Rich pins are basically pins that allow you to include additional information and usefulness compared to regular pins, which is especially important when trying to get people to click through to your blog from Pinterest. One additional feature bloggers benefit from when using rich pins is the inclusion of their blog name on the pin.
To enable Rich Pins, you’ll need to validate with Pinterest that you’re using meta or Schema markup. You could opt to code this in yourself, but it’s a hassle. Instead, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to help with Pinterest, too! You’ll need to make sure to fill in the relevant information for each post.
Click to Tweet
Click to Tweet is the perfect example of how adding a call to action results in so many more social shares. Take some compelling stat, fact or thought from a post you’re writing and add it to Click to Tweet. It will create a box with your text that stands out and encourages people to share. Here’s an example:
”Click to Tweet is the perfect example of how adding a CTA results in so many more social shares”
Maddy Osman Tweet
Tweetily
Before finding Tweetily, I was going to sit down for a few hours and create a database of Tweets to periodically send out to reignite older blog content.
Tweetily is a plugin best used by an established blogger with a large catalog of posts. This plugin allows you to connect with Twitter and systematically and automatically share WordPress posts according to your specifications. You can specify which Categories to include (or exclude), how many updates to make per day, what hashtags to add to each tweet, the format of the tweet… and so much more.
What social WordPress plugins do you currently use on your blog that you’d recommend? Please share in the comments so we can all get better at social promotions!
”Tweetily is a plugin best used by an established blogger with a large catalog of posts.”
Maddy Osman Tweet
Final Thoughts: 5 Social WordPress Plugins You Need for Your Blog
Your blog is one of the best assets you can have to promote your business and interact with your visitors. Thanks to these plugins — they integrate features that do not require any hard coding and make your blog more useful now.
What social WordPress plugins do you currently use on your blog that you’d recommend? Please share in the comments so we can all get better at social promotions!