Make Your WordPress Site More Social Media Friendly

Social media platforms have become more and more important. Whether you’re a business owner or decision maker, a blogger, a thought leader, or someone else with your own website, ensuring that you can build a social media friendly website is essential.

There is good news for WordPress site owners – a few simple tips and tricks can help ensure that your site is like social media friendly as possible.

Let us go through some of the things you must do to make your website more appetizing to the social media giants.

Need convincing first? Read our article on how social media can improve your business.

Content Is King

First, we’re going to start off with what should be a no-brainer, but something that many people fail to overlook. In order to truly be social media friendly, you need the right content.

You need interesting, valuable, funny, or relevant content that actually offers your followers a reason to visit or to share your posts with their friends or family. Check out more here about how to improve your SEO writing skills.

There really is no way to sugarcoat this. If you don’t have the right content, no WordPress tips or tricks are going to help you. It’s as simple as that.

Start with great content, then make sure you have the right tools to help spread that message far and wide.

Here are some of our tips for writing great content for your website that not only helps to bring more traffic from social media sources but also improves your SEO rankings. We 

We also have an article about bringing more traffic to your website you should read afterward.

Calls to Action

In the same vein, you need to make sure that your posts include a call to action that tells visitors/readers/viewers what you want them to do.

In most cases, you want them to share your post, video, or other content with others. Tell them that – come right out and be open about it.

However, there may be other actions that you want them to take, too, which aren’t quite so social media focused.

In that case, you’ll want to make the ask, but provide tools so that they can also share your message on social media platforms.

What sorts of actions might you want your audience members to take? Really, it could be anything, but some of the most common calls to action include:

• Clicking for more information
• Singing up for a newsletter/email list
• Entering a contest
• Requesting more information
• Subscribing to a channel
• Try for free

You get the idea. Make the ask. Ensure that every post or video includes a CTA that directs your audience to take the action you want, but still provide them with the means to help you spread your message.

Add Activity Feeds

Your WordPress website can use a wide range of plugins that offer additional functionality and value. Many of those can connect your website to your social media profiles.

This is a great trick to help your audience find you on those platforms and connect with you, while also making your site more social media friendly.

You’ll find a number of different plugins that offer this type of functionality designed for everything from Twitter to Instagram to Facebook.

These include social media feeds, follow-us-here style plugins, and more. Properly placed on your website, they can be visible without being obtrusive, and ensure that you’re able to broaden your audience without a lot of additional work or cost.

Share Buttons

Perhaps the single most important tip for building a social media friendly website is to ensure that you add sharing buttons. You can do this in a number of places, but within individual posts or content pieces is the best option.

In many cases, the sharing buttons will scroll along with your reader/viewer as they move down the page, ensuring that they can always help you spread the word with little effort.

Of course, your site design might not support scrolling buttons, or you might prefer something different because of your website’s aesthetic.

In that case, add sharing buttons at the top and/or bottom of the post. This allows your audience to share your content when they initially begin reading or viewing it, as well as when they finish it.

We can recommend Mashshare here on cleverplugins as a social media sharing plugin. It has all you need and it loads fast. If you want more cool features the pro version is reasonably priced.

Social Icons

Don’t want to integrate a social media feed into your site? You can still encourage your visitors to find you on social platforms without ruining your minimalist design.

Social media icons can be added to the header, the footer, or the sidebar of your site and provide your visitors/viewers/readers with easy access to your social profiles on other platforms. A wide range of plugins can deliver this functionality, and they all offer slightly different icon style and design to help you fit your overall design.

Embedded Instagram Gallery

Do you share a lot on Instagram? If so, that’s great. If not, you really should start, as visuals are among the most frequently shared content on the web.

Building a social media friendly website involves creating killer content, there is no way around it. However, you don’t have to write 1,000-word blog posts every week to connect with your audience.

Give them some compelling images to share with friends, coworkers, family members, and others by embedding an Instagram gallery into your website.

Make sure your images are shareable

You don’t necessarily have to use Instagram to make your website social media friendly and your content shareable. If your site is image-heavy, such a magazine website, or e-commerce store, then you can use plugins like WWM Social Share On Image Hover or Sumo to make your images easily shareable on all social media platforms with just the click of a mouse.

Some of the simplest tips and tricks for building a social media friendly website on the WordPress framework. In most cases, you need no coding experience. Really, you need little to no experience under the hood of WordPress at all.

The right plugins combined with quality content and an understanding of what your audience really wants and what will resonate with them will ensure you’re able to build your social empire more easily.

Remember GDPR?

If you are planning on taking your business to the next level on the internet, you need to make sure you have everything under control concerning user privacy and that you follow the GDPR rules laid out by EU.

These rules were introduced in 2018 and affect any business that resides inside one of the EU countries or any business outside of the EU doing business with customers inside. Basically, anyone doing business online.

Make sure you have read up on how GDPR affects YOUR business and please remember to share 🙂