How to Become a Social Media Guruand Make WordPress Your Bitch

Sabrina Dent | @sabrinadent | sabrinadent.com

1. LinkedIn2. Twitter3. Facebook

0. Introduction

A. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is advantageous for many reasons:

1/ Where more business and less social networking is done

2/ It's very simple to set up and to manage

3/ Your LinkedIn profile will usually rank very highly for your name. Unless you blog at yourname.com, it will often be the first result, so you want to expend some thought about the results people will see there and use those results to drive traffic to your blog.

1. LinkedIn + Twitter

LinkedIn Feature

Recently integrated Twitter. Siply provide your Twitter name and authenticate your identity, and LinkedIn does the rest, displaying your most recent tweets.

A great way to give people who find and drop by your LinkedIn profile your latest updates and a bit of a view on you.

Can also push a bit of traffic to your blog if you're tweeting links to recent blog posts.

LinkedIn = professional network. Only recommended if you have a professional feed. I swear a lot on Twitter, and therefore do not put my Twitter feed on my professional LinkedIn profile.

2. LinkedIn + WordPress

LinkedIn Feature

Much more useful: recent integration of WordPress into LinkedIn.

Provided LI with your blog's RSS address and it will automatically publish excerpts from your last few blog posts to your Profile.

This is critical as it lets visitors to your LinkedIn profile know you HAVE a blog and the sort of things you blog about. The fact it is only excerpts encourages traffic.

This is a no brainer. Do it.

B. Twitter

I used to get 70% of my blog traffic from my RSS feed; now I get 70% of it from Twitter.

1. Twitter Tools

http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress

Lets people who follow you on Twitter get updates when you post to your blog.

It is, however, ESSENTIAL that you use a pay to play model on what is a social network. For every self-promoting blog link you tweet, you must have at least 10 helpful links, comments, or interactions that are not about you.

Because it's totally not about you.

2. Tweets in Sidebar

WordPress Feature

Lets people who read your blog know you have a Twitter account with different content.

There are a million plugins for this function if you want more granular control over what's displayed and how it behaves.

3. Social Tweeting

Tweetmeme: http://tweetmeme.com/

Lets people who like your blog posts easily re-tweet them. (Tweetmeme has a ton of tools built in, but this is the most important. Avoid some of the others.)

4. Bonus: Naked Icons

Hat tip: @frankiep

TIP: Expose the icons for the social media actions people can take on your blog. Hat tip: @frankiep

5. Bonus: Twitter Analytics

http://yoast.com/twitter-analytics/

If you like stats porn, Yoost de Valk has an excellent post well worth reading on how to gather and analyse traffic from various Twitter clients.

C. Facebook

Very viral

Easy to amass fans

But what do you do with them?

Difficult to communicate with them

Difficult to manange and keep updated

All push: Difficult for your communications to be seen in the flow of data people see on their walls

Strategy: Use FB to push traffic to your blog

1. Blog Posts to Facebook

Facebook Feature

Use Notes to push blog posts to Facebook.

2. Bonus: Multiple Feeds

http://www.chimpfeedr.com/

Use Chimpfeedr to aggregate multiple RSS feeds if you need to, as Notes only allows you to publish one feed.

2. Facebook on Your Blog

Facebook Feature

Put your Facebook on your blog sidebar if you wish.

3. Sign In with Facebook

Disqus or Intense Debate

Unified sign-ons have serious advantages for some blogs that are keen on building community. Real names, for one thing, encourage civil behaviour and personal accountability.

As an option, Twitter and Facebook sign-ins do make it easy for people to comment, and they have to option to publish their comment in their Twitter or Facebook streams, giving you some nice viral.

WordPress at the Centre

Put WordPress at the centre of your social media strategy:

- Push blog posts to LinkedIn- Push blog posts to Twitter on a Pay to Play ratio- Enable people to easily re-tweet your blog posts or push them to Facebook- Consider using Twitter and Facebook sign-ins for blog comments- Incentivise fans to LEAVE FACEBOOK and engage with you on your blog or via your newsletter