social media strategy

An effective social media strategy for WordPress can mean the difference between a struggling website and a thriving one. But what makes for a successful strategy, and how do you go about implementing one from scratch?

Fortunately, integrating your website with social media isn’t as complicated as it might seem. Your first step should be to determine which platforms to target. After that, it’s just a matter of developing a solid strategy and sticking to it. If you approach the process methodically, your efforts can result in increased engagement and additional traffic.

In this article, we’ll talk about why you need a good social media strategy for your WordPress website, and introduce you to three fundamentals you can implement right now. Let’s get started!

Why you need a social media strategy for your WordPress website

When it comes to social media, having a predetermined strategy can pay off in dividends over the long term. With so many platforms available, each one offering such a large potential audience, you won’t get far if you approach them blindly and just hope for the best. Integrating your website with social media will take some work and planning, but you’ll be glad you put in the effort.

There are two main ways a strong social media strategy can benefit your WordPress website:

  1. Increased engagement. One of the best things about social media is that it enables you to easily engage with your users. Having a strategy means you can take advantage of this benefit as efficiently as possible.
  2. More traffic. These days, everyone and their grandmothers are on social media. If you put your content out there regularly and take the time to engage with your followers, chances are some of that traffic will make its way back to your website. Furthermore, diversification of traffic sources helps to shield you against, say, a Google algorithm chance affecting your rankings.

It’s worth keeping in mind that not every site needs to have a presence on each major social media platform. The first step in any effective social media strategy is to identify the right platforms for your needs and target them specifically. After that, there are just a few more fundamentals to consider.

Three fundamentals of a solid social media strategy

Arguably, there are far more than just three fundamentals to an effective social media strategy. However, we’ve decided to focus on those that (a) apply to WordPress websites in particular, (b) are simple to implement, and (c) will provide you with the best returns.

To kick things off, let’s talk about what automation can do for you.

1. Automate your content publication

Automating your content publication is critical if you want to manage your social media accounts efficiently. In most cases, you’ll be dealing with multiple social media platforms, which means sharing content between each of them (and your website) can take some time. Furthermore, this isn’t something you can do once or twice and then forget about it – posting content to social media is a task you’ll need to do regularly.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to automate the publication of content from your site to your social media accounts (and vice versa). In fact, we’ve written articles about how to do this for the most popular platforms:

One more cool thing you can do is install the Revive Old Post plugin. You can set it to share a random post from your archives every X hours to the social platforms of your choice. This is as far into hands-off social media automation as you can go.

If you’re not a WordPress user or you’re just looking for a different approach, you can always check out an app such as IFTTT to schedule publications in advance. These tools work across multiple platforms, and their features can save you a ton of time.

Fundamentals of a solid social media strategy for WordPress: A screenshot of IFTTT.

IFTTT enables you to set up complex automation for your social media accounts.

2. Streamline your reply management

Next to managing your publication schedule, keeping track of messages is the social media task likely to take up most of your time. If you manage multiple accounts, you’ll probably receive comments and messages on each of them. Naturally, logging in and out of each platform in turn can be convoluted, as is keeping multiple tabs open at all times. Finding a way to tackle your messages more efficiently will not only save you time; it’ll provide you with more opportunities to engage your users.

Starbuck's Twitter account.

Major brands such as Starbucks often foster success by interacting with their followers regularly.

Ideally, you want to find a platform that can centralize all your social media accounts, comments, messages, and replies. There are some great tools out there that can help you do just that, such as Hootsuite. It offers a free plan and integrates with most major social media platforms:

The Hootsuite homepage.

If you’re looking for a tool that’s better suited to enterprise-level services, you may want to consider using SproutSocial. This platform shares a lot of features with Hootsuite, but guarantees you better access to support and has a tighter focus on business needs.

3. Adopt a uniform communications style

One of the key first steps to any social media strategy is figuring out what style of communication you’re going to use. Would you rather keep things professional, for example, or adopt a more friendly tone?

Taco Bell's Twitter account.

Taco Bell is an example of a brand with a unique (and funny!) brand voice that is consistently maintained.

Just about any approach is valid, depending on your audience and field. The important thing is to remain consistent across all your publications and social media platforms. For example, it wouldn’t make much sense to adopt an overly professional tone on Twitter, yet be more casual on LinkedIn. Not only would that be confusing for your users, but it would also mean more work for you, since you’d have to switch back and forth between multiple styles.

Maintaining a uniform communications style provides a more immersive experience for your users, and offers you an excellent branding opportunity. Choosing what style of communication to use is a personal decision that depends on your specific circumstance. However, if you’re not sure where to start you can find a lot of excellent resources online about defining your voice.

Conclusion

Implementing an efficient social media strategy for WordPress might sound complicated, but it’s just a matter of keeping a few fundamentals in mind and focusing on the right platforms. As long as you work smart and make an effort to engage your users, you should be rewarded with higher traffic and a more active following.

If you’re about to dive into the world of social media, these three fundamental strategies will help you succeed:

  1. Automate your content publicationThis is key to running an efficient operation and saving time over the long term.
  2. Streamline your reply management. Engaging your users regularly can make for a more active and loyal community.
  3. Adopt a uniform communications style. A unique voice can result in a more compelling narrative, and consistency of tone is crucial.

What other elements do you think make for a successful social media strategy? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!

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