Chapter 1: Exposing Your Content
In This Chapter
Making your content easy for readers to share
Figuring out when to interact with readers
Using Twitter through WordPress
Connecting Facebook to your WordPress blog
After you launch your blog, getting your content in front of an interested audience is one of the most important strategic decisions you make, and this chapter focuses on how to get your content in front of potential new readers. The idea that people will eventually find any content you write is a pretty big falsehood. You might have the best rock band in the world, but if you don’t leave your garage and get your music in front of potential fans, you can’t ever sell out arenas.
By creating good content, making it easily shareable, and then participating within groups of interested people, you can establish expertise and build a community around your content. A community is much more powerful than a bunch of empty visitors — people in a community often become advocates and cheerleaders for your blog.
You want to gain readers, not random visitors. There’s a big difference between a reader and a visitor: Readers follow your blog on a consistent basis, and visitors check out your site and then move on to the next page that grabs their attention.
Understanding the Three C’s of the Social Web
Before I dive into the technical how-to stuff, I should talk about general social media philosophy. Technical tips without philosophy are meaningless. If you don’t have the general philosophy down, your results are going to be poor because your interactions are going to be very one-sided affairs.
You can concentrate your daily actions on the web around the Three C’s: content, communication, and consistency. The next few sections go into detail about each topic. By applying the Three C’s, you can avoid a lot of mistakes and have success with your website and blog.
Content
The first pillar of the social web is content. Although the web has seen a growing shift away from content to community, content is still king. Communities based around common interests fall flat unless they have the content for people to gravitate around. Facebook groups, for example, dominate because of the wealth of content they offer: the posts, links, videos, and other media people create within that group. Without the content, the group wouldn’t exist.
However, content for the sake of content isn’t necessarily in your best interests. To ensure that you provide the best content possible, make sure that you do these things:
Focus your content. People expect tailored content. If you write about anything, people won’t know what to expect and will visit less often or stop coming to your blog altogether. People will come back to your blog for certain reasons, and they want content tailored to what they expect. The most successful bloggers have a narrow focus, and they write for a niche.
When Problogger.net author Darren Rowse (http://problogger.net), an authority on professional blogging, first began blogging, he tried a wide-ranging approach but discovered it didn't work:
“My blog had four main themes and different readers resonated differently with each one. A few readers shared my diverse interests in all four areas, but most came to my blog to read about one of the (or at most a couple of) topics. A number of regular loyal readers became disillusioned with my eclectic approach to blogging and gave up coming.”
Stick to two or three related topics (such as WordPress and related technology topics); you can still cover and talk about a wide variety of subjects that you excel in. People will know what they were coming to your site for and what to expect from you.
Have a voice that people want to hear. People don't necessarily care about the mechanics of your writing as much as they care about your voice. Bloggers, especially ones who post large amounts of content, often have typos and errors in their posts. Tucker Max (http://tuckermax.com), one of the most popular comedy bloggers, switches between past and present tense often — a grammar no-no. He's aware of this problem and doesn't care, and neither do his readers.
Max knows that he’s developing his own style:
“I know, I know. The whole concept of tense in speech has always given me problems. In undergrad and law school, I never really took any creative writing or English courses; it was pretty much all econ, law, history, etc, so some of the basic things that most writers get right, I fail. Of course I could learn tenses, but I have never really made an effort to get it right for a reason: I want to write in my own voice, regardless of whether or not it is ‘correct’ grammar or not. By switching tenses, I write the way I speak, and by alternating between past and present I put the reader into the story, instead of just recounting it.”
Tucker says that the only time people complain about his grammar mistakes is when users want to argue about the content of his blog. They use the grammar mistakes as a plank in their attack. However, this attempt to belittle him hasn’t slowed his growth or success. His voice, after all, is what has made him successful.
Your grammar and spelling don’t have to always be perfect, but you should always ensure your posts are readable. Just don’t let it get in the way of your individual voice.
Present your content well. The actual look of your presentation matters greatly. Adding images, for example, enhances your posts in a number of ways, including
• Giving posts a visual point of interest
• Grabbing attention (really making your RSS feed readers stop and read)
• Drawing people’s eyes down beyond the first few lines of a post
• Illustrating examples
• Giving your blog a more personal touch
• Engaging the emotions and senses of readers
• Giving posts a professional feel, which can lead to an air of authority
Be sure the only images you use on your website are those images you have permission to use. The best-case scenario is that you use your own images that you, yourself, own the copyright to. Outside of that, be sure you’ve obtained permission from the owner of the image before using it on your website. Alternatively, you can purchase images for use through reputable stock photography sites such as iStockPhoto.com or GettyImages.com.
If you write long, poorly formatted postings, people most likely won’t comment or interact with your content: not because of the length of those postings, per se, but because of the way that you displayed them, as long paragraphs of endless text. Pictures, highlighted words, Bullet1 points, and other such tricks give the reader’s eye a break and can make your postings more attractive and more professional looking.
Write often. The more you write, the more people will spread the word about your writing, and you can grow your audience. Successful bloggers tended to post multiple times per week.
All these blog elements are extremely important on the social web. People want to read and view information that they find interesting, that’s well presented, and that’s specific to their needs. Make sure you consider all these facets of a blog when you create content for your blog.
Communication
Communication is the second pillar of the social web. The more you write, the more comments you’ll get.
Respond to those comments! The whole point of the social web is communication and people expect to engage you in a conversation. Successful bloggers engage readers in the comment section and create conversations — they use the blog post as a jumping-off point for a larger discussion.
WordPress guru Lorelle VanFossen (http://lorelle.wordpress.com) expresses the true value of comments and how they changed how she uses the web:
“Comments change how you write and what you write. I suddenly wasn’t writing static information. People could question what I said. They could make me think and reconsider my point of view. They could offer more information to add value to my words. And most of all, they could inspire me to write more. Comments made writing come alive.”
Develop a community. When you participate in the conversation, you’ll retain more readers, who many times will revisit your page during the day to see the new comments and replies in the discussion. The evolution into community discussion can result in a drastic increase in traffic and comments on your blog. VanFossen writes of her blog,
“My site isn’t about ‘me’ or ‘my opinion’ any more. It’s about what I have to say and you say back and I say, and then she says, and he says, and he says to her, and she reconsiders, and I jump in with my two shekels, and then he responds with another view . . . and it keeps going on. Some of these conversations never end. I’m still having discussions on topics I wrote 11 months ago.”
Don’t ignore a person’s comments on multiple posts. You can offend your commenter and lose him. Reply to most comments that your blog receives, even if it’s only to say thanks for the comments.
Having an approach by which you only want to take from the social web leaves you ultimately unsuccessful: No matter how great your content, you need to have a level of participation and make people feel that you’re communicating with them, not just speaking at them.
Consistency
The final pillar of the social web is consistency. When you produce any type of content that you offer multiple times a week or on a daily basis, people begin to expect consistency. Many bloggers don’t post consistently, and as a result, they frustrate their readers.
Although consistency applies to blogging, in general, it really matters on social networks (such as Twitter and Facebook) where the interconnectivity between the author and the audience reaches new heights. If you have large followings on Facebook and Twitter and use them as your main point of contact with your readers, be sure to post on a regular basis there, as well.
Build good blogging habits by following these consistency guidelines:
Set a schedule and stick to it. As a blogger, you have to give people a pattern to expect so that eventually they can know when to look for your posts. This idea is like knowing when a favorite TV program is on — the viewer comes to expect it and maybe even plan around it. If you miss a day on which you usually post, you just might hear from readers wondering where your post is for that day.
If you plan to write five days a week, actually write five days a week and try not to deviate from that schedule. If you plan to post only two to three times a week, stick to the days that you usually post (unless you want to cover some important breaking news).
Don’t let the increasing number of readers and comments impact your posting schedule. The last thing you want to do is over-post. Although some bloggers would argue that you should keep momentum on a particularly popular post, you run the risk of overexposing yourself and burning yourself out — plus, your content can quickly become watered down. The quality of the content, what the people are there for, quickly begins to erode, and you can lose the audience you’ve built.
By sticking with a routine and establishing consistency in your posting, you let readers know what to expect, and your blog becomes a part of their routine. If you ingrain yourself in someone’s life, he or she is going to return to your blog frequently and become an advocate for what you’re doing.
Plan ahead. You also need to account for long breaks in your posting schedule. You can prewrite posts when you have a lot to say and save them as drafts so that you could post them at times when you aren’t inspired to write.
Some bloggers take a month off from writing or post very sporadically. But if you really want to build an audience, you can’t suddenly decide to take a month off because you’re tired of it. Taking a long stretch of time off can kill your blog’s momentum and audience.
You can explore other options instead of leaving your blog dormant. If you’ve built an audience, you can rather easily find a guest blogger to step in for a bit.
Keep the quality consistent. Take pains to ensure that the quality content you produce doesn’t suffer for any reason. Bloggers often capitalize on a popular post, gain an audience, and then become inconsistent with the quality of their content. They either shift away from their original niche or begin to post poorly thought-out or put-together blog entries. When their blog quality suffers, those bloggers begin to lose their audience and can never recover.
Expect some ups and downs. You can’t easily judge which posts are going to be successful and which aren’t. You might write posts in five minutes that get more views and have a better reception than posts you take hours to craft. But readers can really tell when you’re posting for the sake of posting. If you repeatedly have to force yourself to post and if that goes on for too long, the quality of your blog and your consistency can go out the window.
Making It Easy for Users to Share Your Content
When I was a child, I loved to go to a country store on a lake near where I lived. One time, my mother and I went to the store to pick up a few things, but my mother didn’t have any cash (this was before ATMs were everywhere) and wanted to pay by check or credit card. The store owner told her that they accepted cash only; we put the items back on the shelves and headed to a large supermarket.
When we got into the car, my mother said to me, “I wanted to give them money, but they made it too hard for me to do it.” That sentiment has stuck with me my entire life: Never put up barriers to actions that will ultimately benefit you. I’m sure that the store had reasons for not taking checks or credit cards, but it ultimately lost a sale and probably a customer.
Think of your blog as the store and your content as the products. When people want to take your content and give it to someone, you put up a barrier if you make it hard for them to pass that content along. Make it as easy as possible for people to share your content with their friends, family, and co-workers.
One of the best things about the social web is that you can share what you find with other people. Sharing is such a basic concept. It’s such an easy, thoughtful, and fun thing to do. You find content that you like and share it with your friends on the web, who might find what you shared helpful or interesting and pass it on to their friends. But a lot of sites do a very poor job of allowing users to share content. While you set up your WordPress site, think about how you want readers to share your content.
Test, test, and test some more. How to best lay out your sharing options on your site takes continual testing. You can’t get it right the first time — or the first five times. Sometimes, it takes months to find the right mix.
The following sections give you some simple tips to make sharing content from your website easy.
Enable the user to share content
Enabling sharing is the first thing you will want to do. If people don’t have the ability to share your content, it isn’t going to go anywhere.
Sharing content doesn’t mean just social media sharing; your content can get spread through other methods. Include the ability to e-mail or print your posts. Although you may feel that e-mail and printing are outdated features, your users may not.
Don’t overwhelm the user with choices
Sites can include too many sharing options. The reader becomes overwhelmed and probably also has trouble finding the network that he or she uses.
Pick a few sharing sites to which you want to link, test them, and cycle in new ones that people may use. Offer only a low number of sharing options at a time so that people can share your content easily. Determine which of these networks your content applies to. If you write celebrity gossip, your content might do better being distributed on sites where people can share quickly with their friends, such as Facebook (www.facebook.com) or Twitter (https://twitter.com). If you write in-depth technical resources, a social bookmarking site such as Delicious (https://delicious.com) might be a better place to share your content and bring your blog additional traffic. If you write about fashion and beauty, perhaps providing a sharing button to Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) can get you traffic from people interested in those specific topics.
Make sure that the sharing options you give visitors apply to sites where your content makes sense. Don’t be afraid to try different sites and study your statistics to see where readers are discovering your content. Many of these sites allow you to search by domain, so you can check to see how often people are sharing your website and what content, specifically, they’re sharing.
Present the ability to share in the right place for your audience
Where you present the sharing buttons really depends on the type of content you’re posting and the audience reading it. If you post a picture and include a comment below it, this could push your sharing buttons below the fold, so make sure that your major sharing options appear next to or above the content. Some of the more popular places to display sharing buttons are the top of the post, bottom of the post, and in either the left or right margins of the website.
Below the fold refers to what doesn’t appear in a user’s web browser unless the user scrolls down to view it. The term is taken from newspaper printing, in which some items appear below the fold on the front page.
To get some ideas about how best to deploy your sharing buttons, check out sites that are similar to yours and see how some of the more successful bloggers have done it.
Think about the user, not yourself
Take this major lesson away from this section. Too many times, people get excited about the latest gadget or tool for their blogs. They get eager to try it out and excited to deploy it, but in the end, they aren’t thinking about whether it can help the user and whether the user is going to enjoy it.
How you use the web and how you navigate a blog can be completely different than how most other people use it. Review button use and where people are sharing your blog posts and also use tools such as Google Analytics to see how people interact with your page.
By using its site-overlay feature, Google Analytics allows you to see how often someone clicks various items on your website. You can sign up for Google Analytics for free and deploy it very easily. (You just need to paste the tracking code in your WordPress footer.)
To access the site-overlay feature from your Google Analytics Dashboard, follow these steps:
1. On the left menu, click the Content link.
2. Make sure that the Overview link is highlighted so that you’re on the overview screen.
3. Click the In-Page Analytics link.
Now, on the home page of your site, little text boxes for the various links on your home page appear, displaying percentages. (See Figure 1-1.) The percentages within these text boxes reflect how popular the various links are within your site. If you navigate through your site while using the site-overlay feature, you can see, page by page, how people are interacting with your navigation, content, sharing features, and other content.
Figure 1-1: The Site Overlay feature in Google Analytics.
Determining Where You Need to Participate
Communication is such an important part of social media, and communication is a two-way street. In social media, communication isn’t a bullhorn; you need to interact with people. If you want the rewards of participation, you need to listen as well as talk. This idea often gets lost when people start using social media to promote their content.
Determining who you want to interact with and where to interact with them is a large part of using social media in your marketing strategy. Finding the best communities in which you can participate and actively engage in conversations is the quickest way to build a loyal audience.
Although reaching out to audiences known for being receptive to your blog’s content is a good strategy, you may find that you’re following a well-trod path. Other bloggers may have already found success there. Don’t be afraid to try out areas where others who have blogs similar to yours aren’t participating — if you think the audience is there, go for it. Be original and trail-blaze a little.
As a blogger, you often work as the marketing person for your own blog. To gain readership, you need to participate with your potential audience members in communities where they are already participating. Additionally, you can really leverage participating in these communities if you understand the bloggers in your niche, work with them to possibly get a guest-blogging slot, or even get links from them in their blogrolls.
Taking the time to create a list of potential audiences goes a long way toward creating your own blog-marketing strategy. Your list should include social networks and message boards where you think that your content will be greeted with open arms, bloggers who work in the niche you participate in that you want to monitor, and users who have influence on other social networks (such as someone who has a large Twitter following in your niche or your particular area of interest/expertise).
Some bloggers have actually purchased lists of other bloggers in their niche from marketing firms, but this strategy isn’t a good one. Although purchased lists might make for a good jumping-off point, a lot of lists are outdated or ignore important markets (such as large social networking, Twitter, or YouTube friends/followers).
The most important piece of research you can do while constructing a list is to understand the niche in which you’re building a readership. Here are some items of interest that you can look for when finding out about a niche:
Who’s in the niche? Check out the link on a blogroll or in a post. Start with a major blog in your niche and see where the blogroll leads, the links to commenters’ blogs, and blogs that they mention in their content to get a wide view of the niche. Knowing who associates with whom and what circles people run in can help you discover a lot about a niche. You can determine who the power players are, as well as whether the niche is competitive about news or has a collegial atmosphere. This information helps you determine how you want to approach your outreach.
Is there a niche social media site or group that acts as a connecting point for the community? Often, in various groups, you can find one or more niche social media sites that connect blogs together. These sites can provide you with a great resource for discovering some of the top blogs, and they may help you flesh out your list of bloggers quickly. Additionally, see whether you can get your blog listed on these types of sites. Most of these kinds of sites allow free submittals, and you can find forms to fill out or an e-mail address to which you can submit your content.
The site Milblogging.com (http://milblogging.com) is great example of a small niche community designed around a topic; in this case, a community of members of the military. This kind of online community might be a directory with social features, a Facebook community, or a group on a large social network; whatever the case may be, you can often find large groups that have discussions within a niche. These niche sites can tell you what people in the niche you are targeting find important, what the hot topics are, and information about what other people are doing in this niche, such as pitches people have made to other bloggers.
Additionally, these sites feature the type of content that people in your niche may find interesting. Keep a Word document open to write down blogging ideas based on the conversations on these sites.
Are common discussions occurring throughout the community? You can often discover opportunities to get your blog in front of new people or for topics to cover by looking for common threads within a niche. Maybe the bloggers are talking about how PR people are pitching them, a charity cause that they all support, or an event that they regard as important. A common theme may give you information, opportunity, or direction on how you should approach this niche.
Do they use other media to have discussions? Find out what other social media sites people in this niche use. Maybe they use Twitter a lot, or maybe you see a high use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, FriendFeed, or YouTube. You may find secondary ways to reach this niche where you can build a following for your blog.
It pays to determine the social media sites your niche prefers. Certain niches (such as wine bloggers) have taken to Twitter, but others have strong ties to Facebook or other social networking sites. Make the most of these sites when you pitch your blog to people. They may prefer that method of connection.
In the end, you might think you can simply buy a list, slam together a bunch of search results into a spreadsheet, and then mass e-mail everyone whom you want to contact. However, without studying how your niche operates, you can’t create mutually beneficial relationships, you can’t become a voice in the community, and you probably can’t see a lot of success. Instead, you come off as an outsider just trying to push your message down the throats of these bloggers, and your campaign will have very poor results.
Finding Influencers
After you compile lists of bloggers you would like to target, you can begin to break the list down and determine who are the influencers in your niche, including the hidden influencers. Hidden influencers are people that have a large social imprint that doesn’t necessarily show up on their blog. For example, some bloggers don’t have a lot of commenters on their blog, but their Twitter feed is followed by tens of thousands. Here are some ways to determine whether a blogger is an influencer:
Subscriber count: A lot of bloggers who have large audiences display their subscriber numbers on their blogs. (See Figure 1-2.)
Comment count: An active community and commentary group on a blog usually shows that the blog has a large readership. Be wary of blogs in which the author interacts with only two or three people. When an author pays attention only to a couple commenters, she usually has a pretty narrow vision. You want to target authors that participate with more people in their audience.
Alexa/Compete: Alexa (www.alexa.com) and Compete (www.compete.com) measure traffic to a site. They aren't 100 percent accurate, but they do a decent job of giving you a picture of the amount of traffic a site gets. Add a column to your list of bloggers where you can record either the Compete or Alexa score, and then see how the scores compare.
Klout: Klout (www.klout.com) helps you evaluate the influence of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn users. Sometimes, bloggers may have a very large reach on those social networks and are more active there than on their own blogs.
Figure 1-2: Blog subscriber count on Problogger.net.
After you identify the influencers, you want to attract them to your blog. If influencers read your blog, they may offer you guest-blogging spots, share your content, recommend your blog to their readers, and form a relationship with you so that you can be mutually beneficial to each other.
To turn these influencers into readers, you can try multiple tactics, including the following:
Comment on their blogs. Reading and commenting on a popular blog can help you start to build your name in your niche — if you leave quality, well-thought-out comments, of course. Most blogs allow your username to link back to a website; make sure that you use this link as a way for people to find your blog.
Not only can you get the attention of a popular blogger by engaging in conversation on his or her blog, you also get the attention of that blogger’s readership. If the readers and commentators like your contribution, you can get additional traffic, new readers, and even potentially high-ranking backlinks into your website; all because you left a comment on the blog.
E-mail them. Depending on the niche, top influencers might get slammed with e-mail, so this approach might not be the best way to reach out to someone. But it doesn’t hurt to write a personal note that lets the blogger know about you and your blog, and perhaps offer to guest blog if he or she ever accepts posts from other bloggers. Make sure that the e-mail isn’t all about you, which is the quickest way to turn someone off. Talk about the person’s blog and show that you have knowledge about what he’s writing about. Show that you have actually read his blog and demonstrate genuine interest in what he’s doing.
Interact with them on their platforms of choice. Sometimes, influencers or popular bloggers participate in areas other than their blogs. They might use a message board, a forum, Twitter, Facebook, or another type of social media site. Interacting with a blogger on his or her platform of choice can help you differentiate yourself from other bloggers.
Link to them. Linking to bloggers in the content you create — especially if you’re posting rebuttals to their posts — can really get their attention.
When you use any of the tactics in the preceding list, the three C’s (content, communication, and consistency) come into effect. When you communicate with these bloggers, you need to make sure that you have consistent content on your site. Trying to reach out to another blogger when you have only three posts total doesn’t present the most credibility. After you’ve worked at it for a few months, doing blogger outreach can provide you with a good way to grow your audience.
Leveraging Twitter for Social Media Success
Twitter has become one of the most effective ways for bloggers to build an audience. You can use Twitter to find people who have the same interests that you do, communicate with them, and steer a ton of traffic to your blog.
Building a Twitter profile into a successful tool to generate traffic is pretty straightforward. Just follow these steps on your account at https://twitter.com:
1. Make sure that your profile is completely filled out, including your picture.
2. Follow the three C’s — content, communication, and consistency — when you post to Twitter.
By posting quality content consistently on Twitter, you will build an audience. Period. When you mix in the communication aspect and retweet the quality content of others, answer questions, and interact with other Twitter users, your profile will grow that much more.
3. Find people who are interested in what you’re writing about and interact with them.
4. Use a tool such as Followerwonk (http://followerwonk.com) to find people whose profiles contain specific keywords that you're writing about — the best part is Followerwonk is free.
You may want to follow and interact with these people.
Building your Twitter account by using automated tools
I hesitate to include this section because using automated tools is a fast way to get your account deleted by Twitter. Automated tools allow you to do mass additions or removals to your account. You can remove people that aren’t active, that aren’t following you, or allow you to target the friend’s lists of other users to add them to your account. Using these mass adding-and-removal tools kind of goes against the spirit of Twitter, where you are supposed to be discovering cool content and not just mass promoting. So, I’m warning you right now, if you go down this path, you need to see losing your account as an acceptable risk. If you use the tool that I discuss in a logical and nonaggressive way, it can help you target and build an audience quickly.
I include automated tools in my discussion of building your social media accounts because a lot of people use this technique, including people who shun them. (A lot of social media experts who deride these tools have used them to get where they are.) I don’t believe in giving you half the information — you need to make this choice on your own.
However, if you hyper-aggressively add people and then unfollow them on your account, Twitter will probably quickly ban you.
To target users on Twitter, here are the steps you can take:
1. Go to Refollow (www.refollow.com).
Refollow.com is a great service, but it is no longer free. It used to be free, but recent changes to the Twitter platform and Refollow’s need to restructure their service has led to the folks at Refollow asking for payment for their services. You can sign up for free and then click the Upgrade My Account button at the top of the site to upgrade. The prices range from $20 to $150 per month.
2. Log in to Refollow by using your Twitter account login information.
This loads the Refollow Control Panel page, as shown in Figure 1-3.
3. Select the Follow Me, And Who I Follow option under the Load People Who header.
Figure 1-3: The Refollow Dashboard.
4. Click Next.
5. At the top of the page, select the appropriate check boxes, like:
• Are following me
• Are not following me
• I’m following
• I’m not following
• I’ve never followed
• I have locked
6. Select your preferred action under the Act header at the bottom right of the Refollow Dashboard.
You can choose to follow or unfollow the people listed after you’ve filtered them using the Refollow tools.
Don’t follow more than 100 to 200 people a day. This tool allows you to follow up to 500, but if you follow that many people each day, Twitter will probably ban you after a few days.
You can use Refollow to find people who are following people within your niche and add them to your Twitter account so that they may notice your content. I advise adding people in bulk only once in a 24-hour period so you don’t look like you are gaming the system. Once a week, unfollow everyone who isn’t following you back to keep your following ratio even. You should not be following more people than are following you.
Updating Twitter from your WordPress blog
Getting back to WordPress (that’s why you bought the book, right?), you can find tons of plugins to integrate Twitter into your WordPress blog. From how the tweets show up on your sidebar to integrating tweets into your comments, the WordPress community has tons of solutions to help you show off your Twitter account on your blog.
These plugins change often, so try different ones, depending on how you want to integrate Twitter into your site. But if you want to turn your WordPress Dashboard into more of a social media command center, you can give yourself the ability to tweet right from your WordPress Dashboard.
Although tools such as TweetDeck and HootSuite are better designed for an active and strategic Twitter presence, having the ability to tweet from your WordPress Dashboard allows you to update all your social media from one spot. If you’re just getting started in social media, this integration makes your social media use efficient and constantly reminds you to participate.
One of the better WordPress integration plugins for this purpose is Alex King's Twitter Tools (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools). This installation allows you to tweet from your WordPress Dashboard as well as create an archive page for all your tweets. And it can create a WordPress blog post of your daily tweets, among other features.
This plugin can also update your Twitter feed whenever you submit a new blog post. You can update Twitter about new blog posts by using HootSuite, FeedBurner, and other free tools, but going with the Alex King Twitter plugin allows you to use all these features through one plugin.
Engaging with Facebook
Facebook integration is another key strategy to consider when you’re setting up your blog for the first time. First, integrate the Facebook-sharing feature within your blog, which can be done with the ShareThis or AddThis plugin. With over 450 million users, Facebook is a must-have sharing option for any blog.
Next, decide how you want your blog to interact with Facebook. Are you writing a very personal blog? Then you might want to use a Facebook profile as your connecting place on Facebook. Some WordPress plugins (such as the Facebook Dashboard Widget) integrate a Facebook profile so that you can update your status right from the WordPress Dashboard.
However, if you don’t want your Facebook account attached to your blog, you may want to consider creating a Facebook Page. A Facebook Page doesn’t have the Dashboard controls that a profile does, but it allows you to leverage your social media presence. By setting up a Facebook Fan page, you can deeply integrate the Facebook Like option, which allows users to Like your site and become a fan of your page with a couple of clicks. Integrating the Like feature allows you to get exposure for your website through each of your fans’ friends on Facebook.
When you have a Facebook Page, you can display a community widget on the side of your WordPress blog, letting everyone know who your fans are on Facebook. Basically, if a Facebook user clicks the Like button on your page, he can show up in this widget. Facebook offers a lot of different badges and Like-button integration in its Developers section at http://developers.facebook.com/plugins.
In this Developers section, you really can dig deep into how you want to integrate Facebook into your blog. You can display the friends of a visitor who likes your site, recommendations based on what the visitor’s friends have liked, and numerous other combinations.
The commercial service behind the WordPress.com hosted service, Automattic, has created a plugin for WordPress called Jetpack (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jetpack) that bundles several handy social media tools for your WordPress blog, including Facebook and Twitter sharing and automatic posting to your favorite social networks.