There are 115 million people actively using Twitter every month, making it one of the top social media websites and a great tool for growing your business.
Our Twitter account @wpcopilotau is our main social media channel. We regularly tweet with our (awesome) followers, sharing interesting and entertaining content.
Twitter and WordPress can team-up to make it easier and more compelling for folks to share your website content with their followers. It can also build your website trust and authority (but that’s another post). In this post we’ll focus on practical ways you can team-up Twitter and WordPress to amplify your audience.
Create Tweetable Quotes
Creating a “tweetable” button or quote makes it easy for readers to share the key points of your blog posts. Place it directly into your blog post like that below.
We used “Click To Tweet” to create the tweetable quote above. Start by visiting the clicktotweet.com website, and enter the message you want tweeted. Links in the tweet, usually to a blog post url, are automatically shortened by Click to Tweet. Don’t forget to include hashtags for exposure in twitter searches!
After clicking the “generate new link” button, in the next screen you can select an image to link, or just use the text. The cute little twitter bird is the most visually attractive, and his sign “Tweet this” makes a crystal clear call to action for visitors.
To finish, paste the code into your blog post. To add a bit more flair, we changed the text format to “Blockquote” (That’s the WordPress editor button with quotation symbol) and reduced the image size.
“Tweet gating” content
This is a great way to boost the reach of your content. “Tweet gating” gives visitor access to some desirable content, by “unlocking” it when they share it with their social media networks.
Share Locker is a premium WordPress plugin that makes it easy to “Tweet Gate” your content. It can be configured to use any combination of Facebook Sharing, Facebook Likes, Twitter and Google+ sharing to unlock content. There is so much you could do with it, from unlocking additional content in a blog post, to revealing an ebook download link.
Automatically tweet published blog posts
There are a number of WordPress plugins that share your new posts on several social media networks automatically when you publish. Publicize by JetPack, and SNAP (Social Networks Auto Poster) are most popular and well reviewed.
Unless you’re publishing multiple times a week I would recommend skipping this and instead using Bufferapp.com to schedule your blog post and other tweets.
Social sharing plugins
You already know the value of a social sharing plugin, and that there are plenty to choose from. So just a few tips here.
According to the developers of the Tweet, Like, Google +1 plugin, around 99% of posts are shared with 4 social icons (Twitter, FB Like, Google +1 and FB Share). So minimise the number of share buttons you present to avoid clutter and confusion. Certainly mix it up a little to include any social networks you need, but showing 20+ icons is not a good idea.
Has Twitter been a success for you? Know another way to team-up Twitter and WordPress? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
One Response Comment
Great advice Chris. Half the battle is writing and publishing your content, but the other half is syndicating and promoting it!