Tips and Tricks to Manage Your WordPress Social Media Campaigns Like a Pro
It seems like everything has a hashtag and is shareable these days, right? Whether you like it or not, you can't avoid social media. If you're resisting the need to get social, it's time to get your act together. Here's what the experts are doing right now (and why you should be doing it, too).
Social media is everywhere. Almost exhaustively, so. It seems everything has a hashtag, and everything is shareable. But even if you resist social marketing, it’s here to stay, which means now’s the time to get your act together.
There are tons of social “gurus” out there. All of them have opinions and are likely to chat about how their techniques are the best.
And that got me thinking: when you boil it all down to the basics, what really works the best?
What social media marketing strategies are really the most effective?
Today, I aim to show you precisely what the real social marketing gurus are doing (the ones that walk the walk, not the hype masters with no substance) and how you can use their tested tactics to extend the reach of your blog.
From sharing your latest blog posts to curating content to analyzing your audience, I’ll cover it here.
But first, let’s learn by example.
Case Study #1: Ann Handley
Ann Handley really has this content marketing thing down. She’s a best-selling author and chief content officer at MarketingProfs and has a significant social media following.
On her personal site, AnnHandley.com, she offers advice on all topics related to content production, emphasizing creating quality content.
On Twitter, she promotes new posts as they’re published and several times thereafter, always including a compelling image to further encourage a click.
While some marketers use Instagram to directly brand their sites, others, like Handley, take a subtler approach.
Rather than posting quotes from her books all the time and watermarking every image with her website’s logo, she posts photos from her life.
She lets her personality shine through, which is really effective for brand building, especially when your business brand is made up of you!
Case Study #2: Feld Thoughts
Let’s momentarily move out of the social media sphere and look at something completely different.
Feld Thoughts is the personal blog of Brad Feld, a managing director of Foundry Group and venture capitalist.
The site is very simple. In it, Feld shares his latest musings on business and life, often rather insightfully. His social media strategy is bare-bones but effective.
Feld automatically shares new blog posts when they are published on Twitter. He likely uses Publicize since Jetpack is enabled on his site, as revealed by What WordPress Theme is That? He also has Easy Social Share Buttons installed, making it simple for people to share his content across multiple social networks.
Beyond that, however, Feld doesn’t promote his blog posts all that much. Instead, he engages with real people in the discussion. And it’s working. @bfeld currently has over 332k + followers on Twitter, so he must be doing something right.
Case Study #3: Thrifty Nifty Mommy
The Thrifty Nifty Mommy site is built on a custom child theme for the Genesis Framework and is a comprehensive review site for everything related to babies, kids, and parenthood. Oh, and there are plenty of giveaways, too.
With 43k Twitter followers, 73k Facebook followers, and 64k Pinterest followers, site owner Janessa has a handle on social media, especially integrating it with WordPress. She appears to use Publicize to initially promote her posts but also has Simple Social Icons by StudioPress installed for better social sharing and connecting.
Though she uses the same photos across all social networks to promote her blog posts, she offers custom text on each and appears to create a custom image for her posts on Pinterest.
The Future of Social and What’s Trending
It seems like a new report or study is being released about social media marketing every month. And while that might seem ridiculous on the surface, it makes sense.
Social marketing is dynamic. It’s constantly in flux as more people use it and adapt it for different purposes. So new studies and reports can show us where we’re at on the social landscape and how businesses and individuals with websites can adjust their strategies.
Here’s a look at current trends…
Though this is constantly evolving and changing, here are some current social media trends that seem to be thriving at the moment.
- “Edutainment” — Content that educates and entertains
- Videos — Video content is still attention-grabbing and popular (think Tik-Tok)
- Creator Economy — Creator and influencer viewership across all social media will continue to rise
- Social Commerce — It is slowly starting to make a comeback for eCommerce
These are just a few trends happening now. Just be aware that more trends will emerge and some will disappear as quickly as an Instagram Story.
Top Social Media Tools
I did a little digging and found that many social experts use the following tools to promote their blog posts and engage with their followers:
Buffer
A personal favorite tool is Buffer. What started as a simple app for curating content has turned into a full-fledged social marketing platform. It integrates with numerous social networks and can be used for curating and scheduling posts in advance with images and without, 24/7. The company even recently launched a companion app called Pablo that makes it easy to create social images on the fly.
It’s a winning combination that’s bound to save you a lot of time when sharing your blog posts on social media and when curating other people’s content. Buffer offers several plans to accommodate the needs of a wide range of businesses. The Awesome Plan is for those with a few social accounts while Buffer for Business is aimed more toward agencies who need to manage social profiles for numerous clients.
IFTTT
With IFTTT, which is short for “if this then that,” you can create hundreds of “recipes” that allow you to connect specific actions to apps or products under certain circumstances. For instance, if you post a photo to Instagram, then Pin it to a specific board on Pinterest. Or, if you publish a blog post, share it on social networks X, Y, and Z.
It’s easy to setup and use, and once you create your recipes, they’ll just run in the background and you no longer have to worry about them. A nifty time saver, this one.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management suite of tools that allows you to manage all of your social profiles, analyze conversations, and assess your target market to ensure you’re best marketing directly to them. It can also be used as a customer service tool and is an all-around great way to publish content.
It’s currently used by several top brands. Sprout Social is available in several plans starting at $59 per month.
snip.ly
Now here’s a social marketing tool that I wish I would’ve thought of! snip.ly allows you to add a call-to-action to any link you share on social media. So, let’s say you share your blog posts regularly. People click those links and are taken to your site where they may or may not convert. But a major part of any social strategy is sharing other people’s links and content, too. And when you curate, you’re taking people away from your brand. It’s important for building a good rep but it’s not going to directly help you make sales.
But with snip.ly in hand, you can ensure a small CTA is displayed on any link you want, even links to other people’s content. It’s a small popup box that appears at the bottom of the linked page and you can direct people back to your site and to your call-to-action. It’s basically a way to maintain your branding even while the user is experiencing someone else’s content. It’s the ultimate, “This webpage was brought to you by…”
Tailwind
Pinterest is sort of a unique animal when it comes to social marketing, so it makes sense you might need a dedicated tool for handling your content there. This app allows you to schedule pins, monitor trends, and measure your success all from within a single convenient dashboard. The Pin scheduler is by far the best part of this tool, since it allows for bulk uploading, drag-and-drop scheduling, and audience engagement analysis for perfecting your publishing times.
Pricing for Tailwind starts at $9.99 per month for blogs and small businesses and goes up to $799 per month for agencies.
Top Plugins for Social Marketing Integration
WP to Buffer
Here’s a super simple plugin that integrates the ability to share and schedule your blog posts with Buffer into WordPress. With just a click, your latest posts will be sent to buffer for scheduling across all of your social networks. You can configure this plugin to share your posts whenever new ones are published and even when pages or posts are updated.
Revive Old Post
If you’ve been looking for a way to get more mileage out of your old blog posts, search no more. The Revive Old Post plugin allows you to drive traffic to your older blog posts and content on a regular basis, without having to manually schedule everything yourself. All you need to do is pick a frequency for sharing posts and how many posts you want to share each day and you’re done. The plugin takes care of the rest.
A Pro version is available that allows you to add images to your tweets, which is invaluable for increasing social shares.
Inline Tweet Sharer
The Inline Tweet Sharer plugin makes it easy to make selections of text on your site that visitors can then tweet with the click of a button. So instead of sharing just the title of your post with a link, visitors can share a quote and a link. It can be a much more effective way to increase interest in your content. And best of all, the plugin is free.
Image credits: Hans-B. Sickler
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