Five Ways to Boost your Site with Social Media

Broadcast your site’s posts to Twitter, Facebook, and more to connect with customers and attract new ones.

October 21, 2015

Andrea Zoellner

Looking for more traffic? Social media is your best friend. Every Facebook like and retweet helps you grow your audience and attract more customers. To ace your online strategy, optimize your website for social media. From widgets to share buttons, here are five ways to integrate social media into your WordPress.com site.

Social Media Icons

Your website is an important sales tool, but it shouldn’t be the only way you reach and engage customers. If you’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, add Social Media icons to your sidebar or footer where visitors are sure to see them.

There are three ways to add social media icons to your WordPress.com website or blog. First, some themes offer a special custom menu for social media icons. The menu generates icons designed for your theme and are easy to update if your social media accounts change in the future.

Social Menu

Another way is to use Widgets — tools or content that you can add, arrange, and remove from the sidebar(s) of your blog. Select the social media icons widget from the Widgets section in your Customizer to connect the most popular social media networks to your website or blog.

Third, if you have your own social media buttons, you can upload your icons to your media library and use the Text widget with a little HTML to control how they display.

For example, The Foodimentary, a blog dedicated to food-related holidays and holiday-related food has added custom social media icons in the widget area of their landing page.

Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 1.54.23 PM

Sharing Buttons

Make it easy to like and share your content by activating sharing buttons at the bottom of your posts and pages.

Sharing buttons

To customize your blog’s sharing options, go to My Sites → Sharing in the sidebar. You can control the order and look of your social media buttons. You can disable the sharing option and/or like button on specific posts or pages by using the checkbox(s) in the Advanced Settings for a post.

Widgets

Use Widgets to showcase your real-time Twitter timeline, latest Instagram pictures, and other social media activity. Go to Widgets in your Customizer to view, test, and add widgets to your website. Depending on your theme, you may be able to choose where your widget appears on your site. Try different combinations to see what works best.

Customizer

Recording artist and performer Tae Phoenix used the widget area on her website to embed a Facebook badge, her Twitter Timeline and Instagram photos. Her homepage now features all her social media activity in one central place.

Tae-Social-Widgets

Publicize

How many marketers do you need to change a lightbulb? None, they automate it!

With Publicize, you can broadcast and share your content across your favorite social media accounts as soon as you hit publish. To connect your social networks like  Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Path, and Eventbrite, go to My Sites → Sharing.  Try it out now!

Publicize

Embedding Content

Blend your social media activity and website content by embedding tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram photos, and more right into your blog posts and pages.

To embed content, copy and paste the link into the text or visual editor.

twitter

Don’t let your website live in silence and solitude! Integrate your social media activity and watch it come alive. We want to hear from you. Share your stories of how you’re sharing your WordPress content below.

Planning on turning your website into a lean mean marketing machine?

Consider upgrading to a WordPress.com Premium or Business plan to unlock features like advanced customization, more space for your photos and videos, and stellar customer support.

Our Premium and Business plans also include a custom domain and access to premium themes. Try it out for 30 days. (Note that for the domain registration-related portion of the upgrade, the refund window is 48 hours.)

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51 Comments

Comments are closed.

  1. TheBlackLAMB Oct 21st at 4:21 pm

    This is something helpful. Thank you for sharing #WordPress. You did an amazing Job! Cheers!

    Liked by 5 people

  2. bisbabe Oct 21st at 4:34 pm

    Very helpful tips. Thanks for sharing.

    Liked by 3 people

  3. NANABANYIN RUDOLPH Oct 21st at 4:39 pm

    Thank you. Really great advice

    Liked by 1 person

  4. nicolemolders Oct 21st at 4:42 pm

    Why is there no google+ button in the default widget?

    Liked by 2 people

  5. nadishaf Oct 21st at 4:51 pm

    Thanks for the tips….very helpful for the new blogers like me 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  6. Emily Grimes Oct 21st at 5:06 pm

    Thank you for this!

    Liked by 1 person

  7. mollcoco Oct 21st at 5:26 pm

    This is a great help, thank you

    Liked by 1 person

  8. samanthamj21 Oct 21st at 5:31 pm

    I really needed these tips thanks!

    Liked by 2 people

  9. gabrieladmartin Oct 21st at 5:33 pm

    Thank you for the tips. Now I have something to start with… 😉

    Liked by 2 people

  10. Paul Bowler Oct 21st at 7:00 pm

    Some great advice, thank you 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  11. L Horton Oct 21st at 7:35 pm

    I also like to add the Blog subscription shortcode to the end of each post, but I know some people find shortcode just too frightening. A nice touch would be to have a menu option that allows you to select shortcode from a button in the Visual Editor (rather like you can if you use WordPress.org and download certain plugins). That would save having to go into the Support area if you’ve forgotten the shortcode format you need.

    Liked by 5 people

  12. kellie@writingmoment Oct 21st at 7:40 pm

    My next post I will embed video (not mine though!) but I’ve never thought to embed my own tweets from Twitter, great idea, thank you 😀

    Liked by 4 people

  13. MarinaPape Oct 21st at 8:00 pm

    Great post!

    Liked by 2 people

  14. i N S P i R E D ! Oct 21st at 8:53 pm

    Very useful! Thanks

    Liked by 2 people

  15. beckettbrigade Oct 21st at 10:23 pm

    I was just looking into this. Thanks!

    Liked by 1 person

  16. serialdatinggirl Oct 21st at 10:23 pm

    Thank you!! This helped me a lot! 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  17. parulthakur24 Oct 22nd at 12:16 am

    Thanks for the tips!

    Liked by 2 people

  18. shaylamoondragon Oct 22nd at 1:00 am

    Thanks! This is really helpful, especially for a beginner like me 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

  19. Ruth2Day Oct 22nd at 5:29 am

    thank you for these tips. I don’t really understand what embedding is and does? Can you offer a dummies explanation please? 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

    • Andrea Zoellner Oct 22nd at 3:24 pm

      Embedding is adding content to your website that lives on another website. For example, you could embed a YouTube video by copy-pasting the link into your WordPress.com post. The video still lives on YouTube, but your readers can watch it without leaving your website. It’s one step up from simply linking to the video because the video will display and can be played right on your website. You can embed all sorts of things like tweets, Facebook posts, PollDaddy polls, and more. To embed something, often you can just copy-paste the URL into your blog post. You can also usually find the embed code under the share options of that item and copy-paste that code right into your blog post. Here are a few more detailed support articles: https://wordpress.com/support/category/embedding-content/

      Hope this helps!

      Liked by 7 people

  20. catcat Oct 22nd at 5:48 am

    I like the idea. Really helpful. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  21. Joan Oct 22nd at 7:58 am

    thank you for the help. I guess this is what I have been looking for for a while

    Liked by 1 person

  22. Uplevo Oct 22nd at 8:09 am

    Useful tips!, thanks

    Liked by 1 person

  23. Fahad Khan Oct 22nd at 8:51 am

    Thanks for the tips, Cheers!

    Liked by 1 person

  24. maximepeters Oct 22nd at 10:05 am

    Great thank you!!

    Liked by 1 person

  25. Survival Science Oct 22nd at 10:18 am

    Very insightful! Thank you

    Liked by 2 people

  26. Qamar Oct 22nd at 12:49 pm

    Great work guys!

    Liked by 2 people

  27. mysteriousbloggstergal Oct 22nd at 1:58 pm

    umm…. can any of you people tell me how to post and keep it in your front page ?

    Liked by 2 people

  28. Himalayan Wanderer Oct 22nd at 2:37 pm

    Great Blogging tops for starters. Will incorporate a few of them. Cheers.

    Liked by 4 people

  29. robscha Oct 22nd at 7:57 pm

    Thank you for this post! Very helpful and useful for first time bloggers such as myself.

    Liked by 2 people

  30. Jo Smith Oct 22nd at 11:51 pm

    Yes, I’m on Pinterest and I hope the viewers see my Pinterest Page!

    Liked by 1 person

  31. Reenu Jerath Oct 23rd at 3:45 am

    Thank you! This is helpful.

    Liked by 1 person

  32. curlsxoxo Oct 23rd at 6:11 am

    Useful tips! This answers many of my questions. 😊

    Liked by 1 person

  33. vnktchari Oct 23rd at 6:19 am

    Very useful and informative article. Thanks for sharing it.

    Liked by 1 person

  34. ataleofliquidgold Oct 23rd at 11:46 am

    Great advice you have here. Any tips on anonymous blogs to gain audience? Thanks in advance.

    Liked by 1 person

  35. margooregoo Oct 23rd at 5:35 pm

    This was so helpful!

    Liked by 2 people

  36. glenniswritingabc Oct 23rd at 9:24 pm

    Am I correct in saying- by liking your responses I will be able to re-find them under “liked” tab? Or is there another way to save this social media post? It’s very helpful. Thank you

    Liked by 2 people

    • Andrea Zoellner Oct 23rd at 10:32 pm

      “My Likes” is a great place to keep track of your favorite posts. All you have to do is like it! If you want to keep track of a specific comment made on a post, I suggest saving the unique link to that comment. You can get the link for a comment by clicking on the timestamp next to the author’s name. Where you save the link is up to you, but your web browser is a great place to start. For Internet Explorer, click Favorites in the top menu bar then Add to Favorites. For Chrome and Firefox, click the star in the address bar to bookmark it.

      Liked by 5 people

  37. Chenzy Oct 24th at 9:52 pm

    A very helpful post…thanks for posting it!! 🙂

    Like

  38. Merle Findhammer Oct 24th at 10:10 pm

    Great post! I’d love to see the publicize-option also be syncing with my Pinterest-page. Could that be possible?

    Like

  39. tiffanynlondon Oct 26th at 12:35 am

    Thanks for the tips. I didn’t even know you could do all that stuff!

    Liked by 1 person

  40. Toortsie Oct 26th at 8:04 am

    It works for me. Since I connect my blog with my Facebook pages and Pinterest, stats became much better.
    Thanks for all the helpful information.

    Liked by 1 person

  41. sparkle9399 Oct 26th at 2:15 pm

    Thanks for the guidance. Will be lost without this and a long learning curve..

    Liked by 3 people

  42. photographsofthemind Oct 28th at 12:35 pm

    I appreciate coming across your post. Very informative and helpful. I’m new to blogging as of yesterday, and I have been looking around for tips. Thanks forsharing some insights.

    Liked by 1 person

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