6 Easy Ways to Leverage Social Search in WordPress

Few questions to start with- Do you have a Facebook Account? And an Account for Twitter? Are you well-informed about Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit, Google+ and other networks? Well, we know your answer; you know them well and majority of you are also frequent users of such social platforms.

As millions of people are active on popular social sites, it is very obvious that diverting traffic from these sources can prove to be a perfect idea! Other than search engines, it is the social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and more that have emerged as the best content sharing platforms, making it possible to reach a huge audience in no time.

If you are developing or running a WordPress site, certainly you won’t ever choose to ignore the importance of social search; especially when it is relatively simple to implement. As Social Search Optimization and Search Engine Optimization go hand in hand, so know how you can leverage social media to drive traffic to your WordPress blog.

1. Open Graph

Back in 2010, Facebook introduced Open Graph Protocol to promote integration between Facebook and other websites by making it possible for them to become rich “graph” objects, having similar functionality as other Facebook objects. Open Graph comes with several functionalities, major ones being that it allows users to choose a custom image, title, and description for their posts if they want text besides their standard meta tags to show.

You can integrate Facebook sharing controls on your website using the WP Facebook Open Graph Protocol plugin.

2. Twitter Cards

To grab more attention than plain text tweets, Twitter cards are just right- it introduces a whole new world of possibilities where a user can add images, videos, audio, and download links. Twitter Cards enables you to add rich media to those tweets shared from your site. Just by adding a few lines of HTML code to your webpage, a ‘Card’ gets created that shows whenever a reader shares your post. The cards drive more engagement from your tweets and results in higher traffic diversion to site.

If you are someone keen to integrate this feature into your WordPress site then have a look at JM Twitter Cards.

3. Rich Pins

Enable Rich Pins, a Pinterest for business feature for your website to include extra information in your pins. If compared with Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest provides publishers more flexibility and power to visually share and discover new interests. Presently there are six types of Rich Pins viz. app, movie, recipe, article, product and place. All these features make a lot of sense as it is a merchant focused social network.

Adding Social Media Optimization Support to WordPress

Since WordPress is the widest approached platform for people who create tons of contents, adding social code manually is just not practical. But then, to resolve this there are certain SEO related plugins providing all in one social media functionality!

4. Yoast SEO

The all time favorite of WordPress users, Yoast plugin is everything that one can count on. This popular plugin is known to help users grab the best search engine rankings by having a fully optimized WordPress site. The best part is that Yoast comes with social search optimization built in that supports in making your site a buzz name in social world as well. There’s automatic author meta information, and if you are someone running a site with multiple authors then this enables every person to enter their social media details so that all shared posts will show the right information.

The official Yoast SEO documentation covers a thorough overview of the features and technical aspects of the settings.

5. WordPress Social Sharing Optimization (WPSSO)

Yet another helpful tool for social optimization is WPSSO, a lightweight tool which takes good care of technical functionalities of Open Graph code for you. Not just this plugin optimizes your WordPress posts, but also entails a vast collection of add-ons that provides utmost support for enhanced social sharing. Few additional features that deserve a worthwhile mention here are Facebook location support, responsive designs and mobile app store data.

A few of the supported integrations are bbPress, BuddyPress, Gravatar, WooCommerce, Yoast SEO (aka WordPress SEO) and SlideShare. You may have noticed that Yoast has also been included in the list, the reason being that this plugin doesn’t conflict with other SEO tools. It is intended to expand the existing functionalities.

6. Jetpack

Often referred as “Mother of All Plugins” and “official Swiss Army Knife” of WordPress, Jetpack has some social sharing capabilities that simplify the streamline the process of post sharing. Its Publicize feature allows you to share your posts automatically on social media sites as soon as you hit publish.

When compared with other solutions, you will find that Jetpack is fairly limited; as it disallows the customization of meta information for each social network; it simply takes your existing title, description and all and send them to different social networks. So if you just want a tool to get the job done, Jetpack is for you, especially because it encompasses few other promising features.

Rise in social searches imply that you just don’t rely on Google to drive traffic for your site. Your focus on social search will help you fetch easy and ravishing online status, terrific brand awareness and relevance of your site in online world.