Spreading the Word with Social Media Plugins

Social media has become the easiest and most popular way of generating hype and traffic for your websites. And it’s the perfect formula – people are spending a large part of their tie on social media and they are everywhere with it, thanks to smartphones and tablets.

So if you want to make the maximum out of the fact that people are constantly on social media, then you will need some help from a few WordPress plugins. Here we will show you some great social media plugins which you can use on your WordPress website.

Share to Unlock

It’s very easy to figure out what the plugin does when you read its name. Share to Unlock is a great way of creating some social buzz for your website. It costs practically nothing for the visitor to unlock the content. And if they are interested in the topic of the website, they will most likely share it. The plugin is very easy to use and it’s effective! Take a look.

WordPress Social Stream

This is a plugin which easily allows you to merge the information from all of your social profiles. The plugin supports 15 major social networks and there are over 60 custom feed options. This is a great plugin for those of you who are interested in engaging people on the social media.

The style of the plugin greatly resembles Pinterest. There are little share buttons at the bottom of each box which make it very easy for people to share your content.

Social pop

This is a fun way of displaying your social media sharing buttons. It is surely helpful if you want to make a website that is fun to use but is also reliable when you expect it to perform. This plugin includes lots of custom settings and options which allow you to customize how the icons behave. Social Pop comes with lots of predefined icons which are created to suits lots of different styles and designs.

Social Login

It’s not very hard to figure out what this plugin does. If you want your visitors to be able to register and login via the social media, then Social Login will allow you to do that, and pretty easily at that. While this doesn’t give you too much exposure to the wide public, it’s still a good idea to connect your website with people’s profiles in social networks.

Building a Strategy

Even though the plugins are very easy to use and are pretty intuitive, you need to create a strategy for yourself before you just mindlessly add them to your WordPress website. If you just add the plugins, then you will have some success, but you won’t be near to reaching your full potential.

For instance, if you install the Share to Unlock plugin, do you have any idea how you are going to use it? Which pages are you going to lock? How many pages are you going to lock? Obviously it is important that you create the perfect ratio between the number of pages that are locked and the number of pages that are unlocked.

You can lock all of the pages, but when people start coming to your website, they are going to feel as if the only thing on your mind is to get shares and likes. If you have 1 in 30 posts locked, then this might be too little.

Or perhaps you want to give away a free eBook/report after people share a certain page (which contains the download link). Another strategy that you can implement is to require people to share your page before they can register on your website.

As you see there are a lot of strategies in which you can use just that one plugin. Which one you are going to use is strongly dependent on the topic of your website, and on the impact that you are looking for. If you’re just starting out, it’s normal for you to be looking for more social exposure. Once you get to a certain level, you might step it down a little so that you don’t scare people away.

One good starting point is for you to create a list of the social media plugins that you intend on using. Research thoroughly what each one does and how it does it. Then, depending on the size and topic of your website, you can easily craft a strategy. Ask a few friends of yours to visit your website and give you some feedback on the new features that you have. It’s important that you have a second opinion from a different person. This way you won’t overload your website with social media features.