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There is a seamless and automatic way to have your WordPress website push your blog articles out to your social media pages. This article shows you how.
First, I want to emphasize the importance of social media’s impact on getting your website listed at the top of the search engine results pages. For some businesses it is critically important, while others only mildly. This depends on your particular industry, your competition on the web and your specific business. For many small companies that draw from a local geography near their offices AND have little competition on the web, social media may not make much of an impact.
If your company’s listings are at the top of the search engine results pages, then, you may not NEED social media help (yet). This is because the amount of impact your website itself has on your listings is the most substantial factor. In some cases it adds up to 95% of the job of getting to the top. But remember, things change, competitors get smarter and more aggressive. This means you should strongly consider these ideas and get them firmly developed before your competition does so you can remain at the top of the lists.
If Google sees a bunch of companies that have well-optimized websites in your area, they will look outside the websites to determine who goes up to the top of the list. Google will look at the amount and quality of links on other websites that direct visitors to your website. Each link back is a vote for your site to move up the list. After that, they look at other factors in your web presence. They seem to believe that a company that has a significant presence on the web is a more substantial company and worthy of listing them first.
That’s where your social media pages can help. Having a Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn, and YouTube page can give you the presence you need to help your site rise to the top. Writing posts to all these different sites can be a challenging task that takes time and money, which as a small business, you may limited on both. Well, if you have a WordPress website, like the ones we create, you can write an article once and have it push out to all of your social media properties — automatically!
How to automatically make your articles appear in your social media pages
This article is about your own self-hosted WordPress sites, not WordPress.com sites. Most of our clients in the past few years have their site created in WordPress and this will help them.
- The first thing you want to do is navigate in your website’s dashboard to Settings > Writing and add this url to the field labeled Update Services: http://ping.feedburner.com
- Go to www.feedburner.com, sign in or sign up (it’s free), then enter your feed’s url. This is normally http://www.YOURWEBSITEDOMAIN.com/feed (change YOURWEBSITEDOMAIN to yours)
- Go to HootSuite.com and create an account here. You can start with the free account which allows you to feed two of your social media pages. If you want more, you have to go pro and that is a steal at only $9.99 per month. Complete your signup and profile.
- Add your social media pages by clicking the Add Social Media (you can add up to 5 accounts with the free account, but only push out to 2)
- Navigate to the Publisher tab (the paper airplane icon), then to RSS Feeds. Here you click the + button to add a new feed. Paste in your FeedBurner URL for your feed, choose the social media, and the interval of updating.
- You’re set. Now, write a blog post in your website and wait (per your interval settings) to see it automatically appear in your social media.
