J
immywas the person in charge of digital presence for one of the companies that I consult for. He once told me: “people who visit our website do not know about our activity on social networks, and our followers never find out what we publish on the website.”This is a common problem, Jimmy! And there is no reason for it to be, as it is extremely easy to fix. You just need to integrate your social networks with your website and publish on your website with your social networks in mind.
Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.
Ephesians 4:3
Your social networks and your website must be at peace with each other. You must link them together in perfect harmony to express the unity of your message. Unlike maintaining unity between people, this requires a minimum level of effort, if you implement these 6 integrations between your website and your social channels.
1. Include the links to follow you
This is certainly the easiest of all. Most WordPress themes and templates offer a space to include links to your social networks. Use this feature to get people to follow you.
The best way is for them to appear in the header and footer of your page. I like to use FontAwesome, a free specialized font of icons you can use as buttons for links instead of images. Using it helps to optimize your website.
If your theme does not include such buttons to link to your social networks, use a plugin like Crafty Social Buttons, for example, to add them.
2. Make it easy for others to share your content
Next, prepare your website so that its content can be shared on social networks, in at least two ways: mark your quotable quotes and share the entire article.
Quotable citations
First, you decide, prepare, and highlight the quote that you want your followers to share. The most common way is to highlight a short text of your article so that people can share it via Twitter. To do this, you can use a plugin such as Better Click to Tweet.
These plugins have options to choose their visual appearance and the link to share. The one here looks like this and you can see it working in the quote towards the end of this article.
Complete article
Second, the user shares the link or URL (Universal Resource Locator) on their social networks, giving the users the ability to edit their own message when sharing. To achieve this effect, I like to use a plugin called Sumo.
Sumo, among other things, lets you display your main networks in various places on your website, giving your users the ability to print the content or forward it via WhatsApp or email, depending on the options you configure.
3. Use the Open Graph protocol
Open Graph (OG) is a web code protocol in the form of OG tags, created by Facebook, to standardize web references to different kinds of media, including images, audio, and video.
You have certainly seen images on Facebook that appear choppy, interrupted, or do not appear at all. This happens because they do not have the correct ratio, or they do not use the OG labels appropriately.
The All in One SEO plugin, in addition to provide you with SEO optimization benefits, adds these tags to the website and to each entry, so that when you share your URLs they will look good on social networks. You can read more about All in One SEO here.
If you prepare your images so that they look good on Facebook, and they will look good on other social networks as well. You can check the OG tags for your links on the Facebook Debugger before sharing them. This will give you an opportunity to fix them if necessary.
4. Embed the syndicated feed of your most active networks
All social networks have a Resource Simple Syndication (RSS) feed that can be incorporated into your website pages.
If information is updated more frequently on your social networks than on your website, I recommend that you incorporate the source of your most active networks, be it Facebook or Twitter, on your pages.
Each social network has resources for developers, whether to create applications, widgets, or use their data (for example, the number of followers). To embed the feed on your page, you need a widget with web code that you can generate on the social network
In the case of Facebook, this is achieved by creating the code to embed on your website using their own developer tools. Visit the Facebook developer tools site to generate the code. You enter the URL of the Facebook page, or your group page, for example, in my case, my page link is https://facebook.com/vladimirlugomt.
Once you enter the information, click on Get Code. This will show you the code to embed onto your website wherever you want it to appear.
For Twitter, you can follow a similar procedure to embed your Twitter feed onto your website. To do this you must visit the publish Twitter site. You have several options for posting, including your own Twitter feed or that of other people. If you want to embed your own feed, enter Twitter page, in my case, https://twitter.com/vladimirlugomt and click next.
The previous image shows the Copy Code button, with which you can click on to get the code that goes onto your website, in the location you want to embed it. Now, every time you post on Facebook or Twitter, your updates will appear on your website directly and automatically.
5. Aggregate all comments in one place
Although WordPress has its own comment system, I like to use a comment aggregator. The aggregator brings the comments you receive from your social networks and displays them at the end of each one of your posts.
My favorite plugin to achieve this is the Disqus Comment System (which sounds like discuss).
With Disqus, the comments you receive on Twitter, Facebook, or Google are added to those received by WordPress and displayed at the end of each article. Very neat trick!
6. Automatically republish your posts with IFTTT
I have written about this before. If you do not have If This Then That (IFTTT) and Zapier free accounts, please visit these websites right now and open one. They allow you to connect your social networks to create automatic republication flows. You can read more about IFTTT and Zapier here.
With the formulas provided by these web services, your WordPress posts will appear on Facebook, your quotable quote will appear on Twitter, and your social media URLs will appear on your website, without the need for you to visit each social network separately.
If you have any questions about the installation and configuration details of the plugins in this article or about the other tools mentioned here, please let me know.
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