A while ago I posted a quick SEO overview guide, and that had a section on how Social Media played an important role.
While mentioning these topics at a high level, when it gets down to the nuts and bolts, it can be quite time consuming and effort laden in order to actually get stuff done. Any shortcuts that exists, really go a long way in helping cater to the whole gamut of requirements. So, I’m going to pick out at some of these topics and share my personal experiences with them to try and help out a little.
To start with – self hosted WordPress sites (which is what this is) are by far the best combination of ease and flexibility in my opinion. So if you’re going for a blogging platform, start with WordPress.
Then, the first step for your subsequent Twitter integration, is easy. The plugin you want is “TweetMeme“. You can search for it in the WordPress plugin directory, or you can simply download it from their site. Whichever one you choose, once it is installed and activated, it just works. Nothing else required.
To go slightly deeper, and integrate every blog post with your twitter account automatically, you can use FeedBurner. FeedBurner is quite self explanatory to set up, and only requires you to have a Twitter and a Google account to get it working. FeedBurner also has the added advantage of pinging several other blog services everytime it detects a post from you. So that helps in additional link building.
Moving onto Facebook – there’s a minefield of plugins for WordPress out there. There are some that throw everything into the plugin including the kitchen sink, but then they become horrendously annoying to configure and very bulky to load. I narrowed down my requirements to two things that Facebook is really useful for today – “Liking” stuff, and “Comments”. Both of these get entered as stories into profiles. So this does exactly what you want by hitting newsfeeds. Other features like linking to my Facebook “Notes”, or duplicating/synchronising content and comments between the two defeat the purpose of me having a website. So after much hunting, I have found two applications that sort out everything I need:
- Facebook Comments for WordPress by Graham Swan
- Facebook Like by Ahmed Hussein
They need a little bit of configuration in order to run properly, but they come with comprehensive HowTo guides. They do the fantastic job of seamlessly integrating your blog into people’s newsfeeds with minimal brain power.
Have you used or made any other plugins that you’ve found useful?
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