How to Create a WordPress Website Navigation
Social Media: Getting Connected And Sharing
Social media can be used in so many different ways, from customer services to marketing to helping with SEO. To help keep things on topic, we're going to focus on a couple of the website-specific tie-ins you'll want to do in order to make the most out of social media with your website.
Good things happen in terms of your website's rankings and traffic when you use social media properly. It can be an amazing source of readers, traffic, and a great community to be involved with. Some of the popular social media sites include Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest. Lets dive into the important stuff.
Linking To Your Social Media Accounts
Adding Share Buttons To Your Blog
Overview Of The Four Big Social Platforms
Facebook is still the most popular social media site. If you're going to introduce your blog to Facebook make sure to do so in the form of a Facebook Fan Page. This will let you share the information about and from your blog separately from your personal account. Personally, the two do sometimes overlap for me, but I like to give each blog its own home on Facebook.
Here are a couple decent Facebook resources:
Probably one of my favourite social media platforms because it's like the cocktail party for bloggers. It lets you connect and interact with people in short bursts. It's great for asking questions and participating in discussions surrounding your industry. If you don't already have a twitter account I would recommend you grab one now.
Here are some great Facebook resources:
Pinterest is a fairly new platform as far as social media goes. However, it has exploded in growth over the last year and continues to grow very quickly. It is a very visual social media platform, on which you can "Pin" images and share your "Boards" with the rest of the community. It's a great way to promote your blog and get traffic if your topic is a visual one. Get creative and create something to Pin to Pinterest - it's also a great platform to connect with others in your industry and share their pins.
Some recent and good resources for Pinterest:
- The complete guide to getting started on Pinterest
- How to use Pinterest to build links and blogger relationships
Google+
Google+ has been gaining a lot of traction over the past couple years. There are a couple things that I really love about Google+ and those are the Hangout and the Google Authorship. The hangout lets you connect with other people via a shared video chat where you can discussion anything, and other people can watch. The video is automatically published to YouTube after the fact. It's a great way to interact with your community and other people within it.
Google authorship is a very important part of both search rankings and personal authority in the eyes of Google. This is what will put your face in the search engines - literally. Instead of going into too much detail, I've linked out to a great guide on getting the authorship setup. If you've installed the plugin for SEO that we discussed in the last section than you shouldn't have any problems with this.
Google+ Resources:
TIP: Once you've completed these steps to setting up your social media accounts and integrating them with your website, take a read over our marketing strategy guide to social media marketing for information on how to use Social Media for your business generally, rather than just website-specific uses.