Can WordPress bring your Social Media together?

Chatting with a designer colleague last week, he wanted to explore just how useful WordPress can be in bringing together the various aspects of social media these days. How can the power of WordPress be harnessed with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and goodness knows how much more?

Perhaps the most immediately obvious channel that WordPress can include is Twitter – not only by encouraging us to “tweet this” but also showing us a feed of tweets (hopefully relevant!), encouraging visitors to “follow me”, and more.  And now with Facebook joining in, we can show that we “like” a blog post to all of our friends and connections – sharing our information with those that are happy keeping their social media within the one place.

And then there are our favourite online networks, forums and the link – YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, 4Networking, Ecademy – there are many to suit our myriad profiles.

The leap from LinkedIn to Facebook is not going to suit everyone, so by including both on your blog – using your blog as the central hub – you appeal to your wider audience. Give your readers what they want – some like Facebook, others like LinkedIn, some will only see your YouTube video if you include it elsewhere, and  Twitter – which some of us love and others cannot see the point.

Use your WordPress blog as the hub and that way:

• you can be sure of owning the content
• bring together comments,
• update each of the online platforms you use
• benefit from the activity for your website (rather than someone else’s!)

The thing to do is indeed make use of the forums and platforms, but bring it “home” so that your blog and website gets the benefit too.

Hope that’s helpful – if you’re not sure, let us know and we’ll knit more…

Babs