These days, there exists a glut of monetization options for digital marketers. Consequently, navigating the fast and furious world of social media and the diverse marketing options available can be exhausting. With WordPress, however, you have plenty of handy tools right at your fingertips.
In this article, we’ll highlight several effective approaches to integrating websites and social media marketing. Also, we’ll take a closer look at how WordPress can help you maximize time and resources when working with platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Let’s dive right in!
The Current State of Social Media Marketing (And Why It Matters)
It’s not exactly breaking news to say that social media marketing is a big deal. It’s important, however, to understand the current state of social media marketing trends. This landscape can shift and change so quickly that it can be difficult to keep up, and getting left behind as a marketer is a real concern.
Understanding your audience is the first key to implementing successful social media strategies. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some important data for each of the most popular social networks:
- Facebook. Overwhelmingly, social marketers choose Facebook as their primary platform. In terms of usefulness, 97% say it is their most valuable platform for advertising. It’s losing some of its effectiveness with teens, but remains a big deal for small and local businesses in particular.
- Twitter. An impressive 500 million tweets are sent every day. That number has not really changed in the last five years, and Twitter remains more popular than Instagram. It’s also important to keep in mind that 80% of Twitter users are internationally-based.
- Instagram. This platform continues to maintain popularity among 18- to 29-year-olds. In fact, two out of every three adults in that age group use Instagram. With two billion likes being logged per day, marketers have a lot of potential “hearts” to benefit from. Plus, while Instagram is still second to Facebook in terms of platform choice, ad spending is 23% higher on Instagram.
- Snapchat. While it’s still enigmatic to some older users, Snapchat is logging 3.5 billion “snaps” per day. Its impact on younger demographics is profound. The platform reaches 90% of 13- to 24-year-olds.
- LinkedIn. Roughly half of all Americans with a college degree use LinkedIn, and the platform continues to grow. In fact, two new users join every second. LinkedIn remains big with B2B marketers in particular, as 94% post content there.
Knowing where your target demographic is spending their time online can help you sharpen your social media marketing strategy. Of course, choosing the right platforms to focus on is only the first step.
Why WordPress and Social Media Go So Well Together
Balancing website and social media content, which can differ a lot in structure and focus, can be a drain on resources. If you’re not using WordPress as your Content Management System (CMS), you might be missing out on an opportunity to streamline all of your web content.
In terms of CMS market share, WordPress holds the top spot worldwide for the seventh year in a row. This platform is free to download and open source – two factors that contribute heavily to its success. It offers lots of other benefits as well, such as ease of use, design flexibility, and administrative control.
When it comes to marketing, WordPress really shines thanks to its dedicated REST API. This Application Programming Interface (API) makes it easy for coders to connect WordPress’ sophisticated MySQL database to other applications and social networks. Consequently, you can use WordPress as your home base, and push content through API-connected plugins to multiple social media platforms at the same time.
3 Ways to Maximize Your Social Media Marketing With WordPress
WordPress and social media can be a match made in heaven if you know how to maximize their partnership. We have three tips for you to keep in mind as you work on combining the two channels.
1. Make Smart Use of Plugins
As we mentioned, WordPress’ open-source nature makes it easy for developers to “hook in” and extend its functionality. Let’s take a look at a few of the most popular plugins designed to integrate your website with social media.
Available as a robust free plugin, Blog2Social can help you connect your site to 14 different social media networks.
You can schedule and customize your posts with comments, hashtags, emojis and images as well. A premium upgrade is also available, with enhanced features such as the option to connect multiple accounts per network.
Social Media Auto Push is a more network-specific plugin, which provides easy automatic publishing of content from WordPress to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
You can develop customized post types for each platform, and filter auto-posting by post category. You can also disable the automatic posting of page content.
Possibly the most popular plugin used for both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media sharing, Yoast SEO boasts over 5 million active downloads and more than 25,000 5-star reviews.
While primarily an SEO tool, the $89 Yoast SEO Premium plugin includes features that give you the power to preview how your posts will look on various social networks. This includes choosing the images that will be used and tweaking how the post layouts will look. This can offer a significant advantage over cookie-cutter auto posts that might misrepresent your content.
2. Take Advantage of Built-In Mobile Optimization Tools
Close to 3.5 billion people worldwide use mobile devices to access social networks. In the United States alone, there will likely be 186.3 million smartphone social media users by 2020.
For marketers, this means that mobile is clearly where things are happening. Fortunately, WordPress has many great tools for making sure you’re optimizing all of your content for mobile devices. For example:
- The WordPress Plugin Directory offers many tools to choose from that are geared specifically towards optimizing your site for mobile delivery and responsive design.
- Highly-customizable themes often offer mobile-responsive designs right out of the box.
- Popular page builder plugins typically provide previews you can use to test each page’s responsiveness on various screen sizes.
There’s definitely a balancing act between the rate of innovation with new mobile ad technology and the ability of advertisers to keep up. WordPress can be a helpful tool in making sure you don’t fall behind.
3. Showcase Sharable Content
Fundamentally, WordPress is a sophisticated CMS. It’s a platform that can help you create entire archives of searchable content that’s available to share widely online.
Adding media to your content is also easy, thanks to WordPress’ media library. This brings an important aspect of content creation right to your fingertips. Content that features video often results in much higher engagement and conversion rates than other forms of content.
In fact, Facebook users alone are 89.5 times more likely to share a post that includes a video. As a best practice, including plenty of images and videos on your website can help you boost engagement when your content is shared on social networks.
Conclusion
Navigating the social media marketing landscape can be difficult at times. Fortunately, WordPress can act as a home base for your content and business. What’s more, combining WordPress’ flexibility with the power of social media marketing can be an excellent strategy for success.
What plugins or tools are you excited to try out on your WordPress site? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!