by Terri Rylander

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by Terri Rylander

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Websites used to be easy. Just get your site designed, developed, launched, and sit back and wait for visitors to enjoy—right? Well, things have changed quite a bit in the last couple years.

These days, our would-be website visitors have numerous avenues to find information. It’s now our job to make sure they find ours. That means getting your content out there where your visitors can find it. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy – especially if your website uses the WordPress platform.

The simplest way to get started is to connect to the major social media outlets: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Once you get comfortable with these, it’s easy to add additional outlets like YouTube and others.

WordPress makes this very easy with the use of plugins. Here are the plugins I use:

Follow Me – Offers hyperlinked social media icons that your users can click on to follow you.

FT FacePress II – Pushes new blog posts to your Facebook Fan page using Facebook’s mobile e-mail address.

Sociable – Provides a wide variety of social media buttons at the bottom of every post so that users can share your content with others.

Social Media Widget – Similar to Follow Me but let’s you put your social media links in your sidebar or footer so that users can easily connect with you.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – This places a retweet button next to your blog posts so that users can retweet your post.

Twitter Tools – This plugin will automatically push a link to your new blog post to your Twitter feed. It can also create a blog post of your most recent tweets – but I personally don’t use that feature.

Twitter Widget – This is a nice way to share your most recent tweets on your website. It helps users see what you’ve been up to, what you care about, and catch up on info they may  have missed.

RSS – This isn’t a plugin but a feature that comes with WordPress. Users can subscribe via RSS and have new posts pushed to their RSS reader.

LinkedIn – I don’t use a plugin but you can configure your LinkedIn account to accept your latest tweets and Facebook updates.

Subscribe2 – And, for those who still don’t get the whole social media thing but want to stay connected, you can offer to email them when you have new posts. They just have to sign up.

Now you have no excuse not to power your website with social media. It’s easy, quick, free, and will have a huge impact on the reach of your brand and content. If you’re still using a static HTML site, talk to me about converting to a WordPress platform where you will finally be able to truly manage your own site.

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