We love WordPress. There is no denying it, but we want you to love it too. And not just because it is a free content management system that is easy to install and use but because it can do some much more for your business. We have previously discussed some of the different things you can do with WordPress, some interesting plugins, and the benefits of using WordPress as your web platform such as 21 things you may not know you can do with WordPress.
Now we want to turn our attention to using WordPress to drive and manage your social media activity.
Firstly we are going to make some assumptions. You have a Facebook Fan Page, you have a LinkedIn group or company page, you run a newsletter, and you have a twitter account. If you don’t have any of these things, now is a good time to invest some time to find out about these things especially if you are looking to the Internet to drive you sales and revenue.
Here are a few ideas to help you understand the benefits of using WordPress to control your social media activity.
WordPress gives you the ability to have RSS feeds for each category on your blog. Most companies may use their main overall RSS feed but you have options to use each category one independently, and this can help drive real relevance to your social media marketing efforts.
Facebook Fan Pages
You can use a WordPress plugin such as SNAP to automatically post your content on to your Facebook page or profile.
You can also use a category on your WordPress blog to post updates to your Fan page that can’t be seen anywhere else.
This means you can make sure you are consistent in promoting the content once it is provided.
LinkedIn Groups
Use a WordPress category to build and manage your LinkedIn Group News by pulling in a single category RSS feed.
Using the same SNAP plugin as discussed above, you can automatically share your posts with your Twitter audience.
Online Newsletters
Use a category to build and run your online newsletters – these can be pre-written and set to a schedule of release automatically. Most Email solutions such as Mailchimp now allow you to add an RSS Feed and when a new post is added to your website it gets added to the feed it and then it sends an email out to registered users to let them know you have published a new post. That post can be a newsletter and also include calls to action to drive people back to the site.
Summary
So as you can see once these properties have been set up you can simply manage content distribution to all these different places via your WordPress site. Simply selecting the relevant category to post in determines where that content is posted and who it is shared with.
By using WordPress in this way, you are able to manage all of your social media from one place, in this way not only does it make life easier, but it is also then easier to manage the effectiveness of what you are doing.
