Social Networking and WordPress
Posted on 13. Jul, 2009 by Terry Reinert in WordPress
At this point in time I feel comfortable saying that anyone who does anything on the internet has heard of Twitter, Facebook, and the term Social Networking. Both Twitter and Facebook have been talked about in the news media a great deal over the last year as both have gained huge popularity with many different crowds in both the professional and personal genres. There have also been many blog’s talking about how to use both effeciently and listing out the top 20 things to do and the top 20 things not to do when it comes to using social media sites for your business. Even Layers Magazine has a multi-page article written by Nancy Masse (NAPP’s Social Media guru) on Twitter. There is so much coverage on these types of sites that it can make one sick of hearing about them… so am I going to just rejurgitate the same drivel in this blog? Nope, I am instead going to talk about how you can use WordPress plug-ins to add social media to your site and help drive traffic to your site using social networking websites.
Lets start simple and talk about integrating Twitter with your WordPress blog. There are two plug-ins that I use for Twitter that I really like. The first is Twitter for WordPress by Ricardo Gonzalez. The Twitter Updates sidebar widget that you can see on the right sidebar of my blog is generated from this plug-in. What it does is very simple… it grabs your latest tweets from Twitter and displays them on your blog. The second is WordTwit by Dale Mugford and Duane Storey. WordTwit is another simple plug-in and this one will auto-tweet your WordPress blog posts when they go live on your blog site. You can configure what you want it to say when it tweets your latest post. Both are good plug-ins to get your WordPress blog set up to take advantage of Twitter.
As for Facebook integration, there is a simple way to do this without touching your WordPress blog at all… assuming you are using the WordTwit plug-in I mentioned above. I installed what they call a Facebook Application for Twitter that grabs my latest tweet and posts it to my Facebook page. So now each new post will be added to Twitter by the WordTwit plug-in and then the Facebook application copies from Twitter over to my Facebook page. This is ideal because there is no additional plug-ins needed that will slow WordPress down further. Win-Win situation!
So far I’ve talked about Twitter and Facebook but the social media websites go well beyond just those two. There is a category within the social media site genre that is more about sharing links and information. Some of the sites in this category are DIGG, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Technorati. There are of course a ton of others but those are the big ones in my opinion. In order to make use of these sites I run a WordPress plug-in called Sociable by Yoast. At the end of every post and page a small bar of icons is displayed for various social media websites. Readers can click on those icons to share the blog on any of those sites with their friends and followers. The plug-in has support for a ton of sites and provides a means for you to add in custom sites that it doesn’t support. I configured mine to show the big ones… Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Technorati, Twitter, Facebook, Google Bookmarks, Slashdot, and Blogsphere News. I tried to keep the number of sites displayed small so as not to have a huge icon bar and overload readers with sites they probably don’t use.
Let’s talk for a second about some of the sites I mentioned above…
Digg is a pretty cool site that tracks the number of Diggs a blog has received. The more diggs the post has received the more interesting the site is… so you can browse sites in many different categories based on the number of diggs they have gotten to find information you might be interested in.
StumbleUpon is another cool site that allows people to stumple upon websites that they might be interested in. There are toolbars for all the web browsers for this site that allow you to click a button to be taken to a random website in the categories you signed up to that people have entered into the site by either going to the StumbleUpon website or clicking on the icon in my little Sociable bar. This is a good way to find new sites to look at and other items of interest that you may otherwise never have found out about!
Those are the two that I am primarily interested in getting my blog listed on, along with Twitter and Facebook, so that is why I configured Sociable to put those two icons first (after the print icon of course). Either way, the Sociable plug-in is a good way to make it easy for readers to share your content with others which results in more traffic and exposure for your site!
One last plug-in that I want to talk about is BackType Connect. What this plug-in does is searches various social networking sites like Digg, Facebook, and Twitter for anything linking to your blog and then adds what they said and a link as a comment to your blog. There are many reasons that this is good… provides more interaction on your blog, makes you feel special that people are talking about you, and looks better to search engine bots that index your site to name a few.
So there you have it… some good ideas on how to automate the linking of your WordPress site with the top social networking sites on the web. I highly recommend using all the plug-ins that I talked about above. You will be very happy that you did!
And on that note… please click on the links in the Sociable bar below to share this post with your friends! Can ya Digg? You can also follow me on Twitter @tkrphoto and see my Facebook fan page!
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