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One of the reasons I love WordPress is the flexibility it offers, through plugins, to customize your website to do anything you want. Over 25 per cent of all websites out there are built on WordPress. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your site, here are some of the WordPress plugins you should consider installing to leverage your social media efforts.
Social Warfare
Social Warfare (AFF) is one of my newest additions to my WordPress website. See those pretty, floating sharing buttons at the bottom of your screen? Those are from Social Warefare. Besides the great social sharing buttons, this plugin designates an image and description to autopopulate when a reader shares to Pinterest (something most sharing plugins don’t do) and it allows you to designate what is tweeted out when the Tweet share button is clicked (THIS is why I bought the plugin.)
Akismet
If you blog regularly, you will receive hundreds, if not thousands, of spam comments on your blog. Deleting them takes a lot of time, and if you don’t delete them, your blog looks unkept and unprofessional. Akismet is the plugin that catches the majority of the spam comments automatically so you don’t need to waste your time deleting them.
Revive Social
Revive Social (AFF) is a plugin that recycles your old blog posts consistently on a schedule you set. It’s great for people who blog on a regular basis and have a lot of content that doesn’t really expire (evergreen content). The pro version allows you to customize the sharing schedule for each of the networks. There are a ton of features built-in I haven’t even tried to figure out yet. This one is pricey at $75+ USD per year, so don’t buy in unless you’re really blogging consistently and have a library of stuff built up to share.
Click to Tweet
Anyone can use Click to Tweet manually at their website, but there are multiple plugins for WordPress websites that make the process easier. These plugins allow you to set up an “easy button” to encourage your readers to share your articles. I’m using the Social Warfare version, but there are others, including an official WordPress plugin from Click to Tweet. They makee things like this:
[clickToTweet tweet=”Looking to up your #socialmedia game from a WordPress website? Great plugin suggestions here:” quote=”Click here to see how a Click to Tweet button can work. This is what I want you to tweet to share this article :)” theme=”style5″]
YOAST SEO
YOAST SEO will walk you through all of the steps you need to follow to properly SEO each blog post. It also designates the images to be used when your article is shared to Facebook and Twitter (redundant if you’re using Social Warefare). If, when sharing your website to Facebook, there is no image automatically pulled to go with the blog post, you need this. It’s also great for websites where the blog’s featured image isn’t necessariy the image best shared to social media, like mine. If I allowed Facebook to use my “Featured Image”, it would pull the one you see at the top of this article, which isn’t properly sized and does not contain any text. Whether or not that works depends on the blog.
MailPoet
This is a great plugin that easily allows your readers to sign up to get your blog by email each time it’s published. Once it’s set up, it all happens automatically. The more they read, the more likely they are to come back to your site and/or to share, right?
Do you have another great WordPress plugin to elevate your social media efforts? Let me know in the comments.
