WordPress 24-Hour Trainer, 3rd Edition

Lesson 22Connecting To Social Media

It's absolutely crucial these days to connect with your audience through the social media networks it uses the most. You don't need to be on ten different social media sites; only use the ones you need to reach your visitors.

You can connect your website to social media in four ways:

• Helping visitors follow you on your accounts
• Letting visitors share your content through their accounts
• Posting directly to social media from your website
• Displaying your social media feeds (your activities) on your site

Although entire books are written on each of these topics, this lesson covers them briefly, showing you how they work in WordPress.

Helping Visitors Follow You

Social media networks want you to bring traffic to your page or profile, so they make it easy to include follow buttons on your website. The individual terminology may vary, but the idea is that you want visitors to follow what you do on that particular network: liking a Facebook page, following a Twitter account, or joining a Google+ circle, and so on.

Twitter is used for the example here, but the process is similar no matter what network you use.

The first thing you need to do is log in to your account so that the resulting button is tied to your credentials. Then look for a link that says something such as Promote, Resources, or Widgets (not to be confused with WordPress Widgets).

From the available tools, you want the one that typically says “follow” or some similar terminology. ...