WordPress is a popular website-creating platform that powers 43.1% of all websites. As an open-source content management system (CMS), it offers extensive features for website optimization.
These features are beneficial, as search engine optimization (SEO) plays an important role in driving traffic. One of the best off-page SEO practices is improving your website’s social media presence.
Therefore, this article will discuss seven effective ways to boost social media marketing strategies for WordPress websites.
Why Use WordPress to Support Social Media Marketing
WordPress is free software, meaning site owners can allocate more of their budget to comprehensive digital marketing strategies. Even so, you’ll need to set aside some funds to pay for secure wordpress hosting and optional premium plugins for maximum results.
Due to WordPress’ popularity and reliability, many providers offer managed WordPress hosting plans. It costs slightly more than regular shared hosting because of its tailored support and advanced optimization for WordPress sites. Head to hostinger.com to read more about WordPress hosting.
Furthermore, WordPress has a lot of helpful plugins to boost websites’ presence in social media sharing. Many are free to use and beginner-friendly. WordPress is also convenient because of its customizability, enabling website developers to fully scale and boost site performance.
Another reason to use WordPress is that the platform supports plenty of media file types. This helps WordPress site owners integrate all types of video, audio, and visual content according to their social media marketing strategies.
How to Use Your WordPress Website for Social Media Marketing
WordPress makes it easy to integrate a website with social media channels. This section will discuss seven ways to utilize WordPress to improve your brand’s digital marketing on social platforms. Let’s dive in.
1. Choose a Responsive WordPress Theme
A responsive theme can adjust website content according to visitors’ screen sizes.
If you plan to attach a direct link to your WordPress website on social media posts, there’s a high chance that visitors will access it from their mobile devices.
That means having a responsive WordPress theme is crucial to provide a comfortable user experience. Moreover, it is also a ranking factor on search engines like Google. Making your website streamlined and visually appealing on every device also helps your website look professional.
Fortunately, responsive WordPress themes are easy to find. Many are available for free, while others offer premium subscriptions at various price ranges.
2. Optimize Website Page Speed
Using social media platforms to promote your site means there’s a good chance that you’ll reach a broad potential audience. That’s why it’s necessary to make sure your website is well-optimized and ready to handle increased traffic.
Loading speed affects your website’s bounce rate, so ensure that web pages load under three seconds. Here are several ways to optimize your WordPress site’s performance:
- Make use of browser caching – setting up your website’s cache can improve page loading speed by downloading parts of website content to visitors’ browsers. This means that browsers don’t need to reload a website’s media content when they revisit the same web page.
- Use content distribution networks (CDNs) – the main function of a CDN is to copy your website’s files and store them at different data centers worldwide. That way, visitors can access it via the closest server to ensure faster page loading speed.
- Optimize media content – avoid embedding large media files on your website homepage, or make sure to compress these files before uploading them online.
3. Create Visual Content
It’s clear that visual content is powerful in social media feeds as it’s a great tool to attract audiences’ attention. For similar reasons, creating visual content is highly beneficial for websites.
For example, images and videos can break down and communicate lengthy information in an engaging and concise way, making it easier to reduce bounce rates. What’s more, high-quality visual content helps improve conversion rates.
Additionally, visual content can help in raising brand awareness. This is supported by the fact that most people are visual learners who retain information better with images or videos.
Consider creating videos as your WordPress site’s primary visual marketing strategy, as Cisco projects that this media format will make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2022.
4. Optimize Content for Search Engines
Optimizing website content can be done using SEO WordPress plugins. Each of them offers different features and tools depending on the SEO capabilities. Each of them offers different features and tools depending on the WordPress SEO capabilities.
Here are several plugin recommendations:
- Yoast SEO – offers a complete guide on how to create on-page SEO for your website posts. It is beginner-friendly and considered one of the best SEO plugins.
- SEOquake – perform SEO analysis without needing to access the WordPress dashboard by installing the plugin’s Chrome extension.
- W3 Total Cache – helps with file compressions and website caching to improve your site’s loading speed.
- Analytify – if you rely on Google Analytics to gather website statistics, this plugin offers easy integration.
- Akismet – activating this plugin will filter spam, malicious, or black hat SEO comments from your posts.
A well-optimized website has the potential to be seen as credible and trustworthy by search engines, meaning that there is a good chance to rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Ultimately, website SEO and social media marketing share a mutually beneficial relationship to increase website visibility and drive traffic.
5. Use Paid Ads
There are two types of paid ads – search engine ads like on Google and social media ads like on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. The main difference between the two is the target audience and the payment system.
Google ads make your website posts appear at the top of search results, increasing your site’s chance of gaining higher traffic.
On the other hand, social media ads appear on users’ feeds and are usually used to raise short-term awareness for a specific post or a marketing campaign. Running ads on social channels is also an excellent way to promote your WordPress website.
In terms of budget, you can generally set a limit on how much you want to spend on the ads. Most ad platforms will charge you for every click the ad receives, called a pay-per-click system.
6. Share the Content
Another important aspect to improve your website’s social media visibility is letting visitors share your content. By doing so, your existing audience’s follower base becomes your potential viewers.
This helps increase organic traffic to your WordPress site using word-of-mouth exposure from visitors who find your content valuable. That’s why embedding social media buttons is crucial to make your content shareable in an instant.
7. Enable and Respond to Comments
Turn on the comment section on your website to allow audience discussions, as well as to build engagement with them. This can also be an opportunity to promote your social media channels.
Just like how brands engage with their social media audience, letting people comment and respond to website posts helps businesses build a better emotional relationship with customers.
Take time to respond to visitors’ comments and aim to answer their needs, regardless of whether it’s a complaint or a clarifying question. As for preventing spam comments, you can install a WordPress plugin to block them automatically.
Conclusion
Social media marketing strategies work better when it’s supported with website optimization. Fortunately, you can improve both easily using the right tools, such as WordPress plugins.
In this article, we’ve discussed seven points to maximize social media marketing using WordPress. Here’s a short recap:
- Choose a responsive theme
- Optimize website speed
- Create visual content
- Optimize content for search engines
- Use paid ads
- Share the content
- Enable and respond to comments
These are just a few simple ways to improve your social media marketing for increasing website traffic. Most importantly, make sure your website is well-optimized, offers valuable content, and looks appealing to readers.