Integrating Social Media Into Your Blog

In this video me to be looking at 10 different plug-ins and tools for social media and your website hi my name is Adam from WPCrafter.com were I make WordPress videos for non-techies enjoy the content in this video would like you to consider clicking on the subscribe button and if you’d like notifications when I put a new video out there’s little bell off to the right click on that and you too will notify you when I’ve uploaded a new video summary to take a look at social media plug-ins and tools and these kinda fall into two different categories and I’m in a just a blaster these different plug-ins and tools right here in this video but you have your tool for having the social media sharing buttons on your website so and ends can a formatting what happens when someone shares it says one kind of tool and then the other kind of tool is taking your content and distributing it on different social media networks, to be looking at both in this video so let’s get started if you head over to WordPress.org and type in social media there are a good jillion different plug-ins available for all kinds of different topics so might be a little hard to navigate that so many do my best in this video to navigated ON let me preface one thing by saying I’m not to be positive on these tools because there’s a lot of junk out there in them to be talking about some of the popular but kind of junkie stuff as well so you’re gonna get a real honest transparent look at these various tools so first we’ll talk about ways of getting the plot of the buttons on your website and then will look at the tools for distributing and syndicating your content so first I wanted to talk about master share this is a free plug-in that gives you the social sharing icons at the top of your page when the user scrolls down and it’s gonna look very much alike MashShare does if you ever go to Mashable’s website is can show you the amount of shares and views and have those sharing buttons when someone scrolls down the page I think we have some screenshots down here below of the different options so here is essentially what it’s going to look like this is actually very neat if you go to Mashable’s website and you like this feature on their website it’s going to be very good and this is another feature right here that gives you the options of what will be prefilled out when someone clicks on the Twitter button or the Facebook button and I believe it might also let you choose the image that gets linked up when someone goes to share it there’s a whole bunch of different options so this is deftly one to test and to check out that’s life take a look at this in the site I think is the most popular plug-in for adding buttons to your website it’s the social media share buttons and social icons at the long name they also have professional version there’s lots of options here for different button styles and that’s very nice they also have a paid upgrade version that is right here and there trying didn’t do like a little too much Internet marketing with hits so here it is this explanation of what you get when you buy it and there’s this bullet list of items and it’s worth $125 and it is just a bunch of fake numbers there but it’s only 25 bucks to purchase the full version and it’s can give you some more options for the buttons and there’s some actually really neat options that it gives you but here’s a nice list of everything you get with the paid version of the plug-in things that it’s going to head going to go ahead and add next is some paid options and here is a monarchy from elegant themes now if you already have an elegant themes membership this is definitely something to look at because you’ve actually already purchased it so if you’re a Divi user this is definitely one of the plug-ins that is in your membership but you can really style and create some really pretty looking custom looking mouth social sharing buttons with this that supports a whole bunch of different networks it’s actually pretty nice income to the link here and check out a live preview of all of these different options and have links to everything down below of course so this is Monarch now I wouldn’t suggest going in getting a Divi and elegant themes membership just for this plug-in I probably wouldn’t do that next is the next phase 1 is social warfare in this actually happens to be the plug in that I use on my site in its gotta be kind of the most popular social media sharing plug-in that is available right now there’s a ton of things that it does now the free version is actually lame it’s in the WordPress for depository I don’t even know why they have the free version you’re not don’t want the free version you’re definitely gonna want to pay for the upgraded him and assure you that in a moment 30 active on over 30,000 websites you see right here they have 10 the one star reviews and this is all people that had that same sentiment as me as why do they have a free version that really is limited and doesn’t do anything and I don’t even know how serious they are about the free version they don’t even have any images of the free version right here so it’s really probably just a way of distributing the plug-in but you really gonna want the paid version of it and here’s where you get all the information on it it’s what I like about it is number one I really like the modern look of placement of the buttons in the a different option I get with the buttons I really like how when someone scrolling I can kind of habit and sticking to the bottom are sticky to the top I can like that a lot it is a higher performing plug-in so what happens if you have the feature enabled on any of these plug-ins were it’s going out to get the share accounts that is going to put a bit of stress on your web hosting account and your website and make it a little slower so what this does is it kinda cashes those statistics so it’s not going and checking them out every time this also has the option when you’re in the the back end of a post or page it gives you all those options of customizing the text for the different social networks I like that a lot in but you also get that for free and Yoast this is it really that expensive I think like 30 bucks some and actually talk about should you buy these things here in a moment whether it is it’s 30 bucks a for one website I use this on my website now here let me just read a bit of reality to this whole social media thing if I had a limited budget of what I was gonna pay for or by for my website this probably wouldn’t be that list I probably would be like oh this is going to be $30 well spent now if you have a lot of traffic on your website you want more control over these the sharing aspects of your website then by all means go ahead and get the best in class that’s that’s kind of where I met but if if I did have a huge budget for my website I’m not going to feel this urge like I’ve got to have one of these paid plug-ins now most themes or you’re going to have some form of social sharing icons built into it and then with Yoast if you’re using Yoast of WordPress SEL it’s a free plug-in that’s going to give you the options of customizing the text that goes out when someone shares your your poster page on Facebook or twitter it’s going to have that in there so you don’t need a plug in for that also when it comes to the whole argument of this is going to help you get more leads get more social shares I don’t really believe that it all actually I haven’t really seen any kind of concrete evidence that if I have a prettier button someone’s going to go ahead and click on the share button I think of someone like you and they like your content in US and the click on the share button or share your content they’re just going to do it so I don’t necessarily think that these things are really going to really drive the traffic to your website I would go ahead and suggest if you have something that’s built into your website theme or your page builder go ahead and use that because that’s probably half that you really need but then when the time comes that you want more fine-grained control then go ahead and dump a little bit of money into it then I would suggest coming here and buying this plug-in but I wouldn’t buy this off the bad just because other people are using it so there is my two cents about should you buy any of these things if Yorty have something that’s meeting your needs just go ahead and stick with that now were going to talk about the different couple plug-ins and a couple services that will distribute your content to your social media profiles and first working to take a look at probably the most popular one is called next Scripps auto poster and I have used this in the past and I don’t use it now I’ll explain why in a moment this is actively used on a plan of the websites and that’s probably because it’s free they also have a paid version that has some additional features now this is one where you might want to count the cost before you add this to your website I notice for me when I used it a couple problems number one problem was that it slowed down my website made my database grow a little larger number two which is the biggest problem it just went haywire so what this does is it looks at your content you can create a posting schedule and it will kind of randomly auto post some of your content to social networks which at the time was what I was after and one day it just went completely haywire on me and it was posting something new like every minute to my social networks now thank goodness I noticed that just like an hour and 1/2 into it but that’s definitely not what you want to have happen on your social I mean that’s the number one way of getting people to unfollow you is to be given them a whole bunch of information and filling up their feed it’s just an annoying thing so I literally had to disable deactivate and delete the plug-in and then I had to go to each of my social profiles there and delete all this auto posted content and that was actually my last attempt at having some kind of automated solution where would automatically take the content that I’ve already created in distribute that in even try to share some of the older stuff so here’s next scripts now that problem is in the current version and they said that in version 4 of this there on version 3 version 4 comes out that’s can you be gone but see when you come to their website and you click on blog when you scroll down your Tennessee they’ve been talking about their version 4 of the plug-in for nano three years here it is here it is right here here’s and I’m not even going further back I’m just going on the first page of the blog post it says right here December 5, 2014 version for auto reposting and it says right here it’s coming out soon so I don’t know what their definition of the word soon is but I think 2 1/2 years is a little longer then as soon so I really wouldn’t trust this plug-in based upon my own personal experiences and plus you know they’ve been promising this new version for 2 1/2 years probably longer probably three years and it still hasn’t come out I don’t think it’s actually ever going to come out but they do have a paid version of this and willing to down below next is blog to social this is another one that I’ve tried worried tries to do the same thing were looks at your prior content and it will auto reposted based upon a schedule and I had a pretty bad experience with this one as well there is also a lot of bad reviews for this one and I could partially BBQ be because this is another one of those free plug-ins that you is kind of worthless unless you actually pay for the paid version so here is their website and there is a paid version I think it’s like maybe 70 bucks a year or something like that yet here it is 70 bucks a year for a website and honestly this is like one of the gripes I have with you know people that write reviews you go here and you look at this top bar and you have some of these the familiar looking websites right there that say it’s recommended by and I guarantee if anyone recommended this it wasn’t because they use it for any length of time because if they had they probably would’ve realized this is not something that WordPress should be doing this is not something that should be set up and controlled inside of WordPress this is probably something best left to a service this auto reposting so that’s when the gripes I have about a people that review stuff there so afraid to say anything negative about a product or take a position that something might be good or bad will they say everything’s good anyways next is that were to take a look at some of the software is a services and here’s one that actually happens to I’m testing out right now and there have is been AppSumo deal on probably for another three or four days from posting this video and is called amplifier and what this allows you to do is it allows you to to put in your different profiles and there’s a whole bunch of different social media networks that are supported including Instagram and Pinterest Twitter of course Facebook Facebook groups Facebook pages and LinkedIn and the list goes on and on in a couple of other ones and this allows you to do a lot of cool things it’s going to go ahead and analyze some of your past social media activity and it’s going to try to determine the best times for you to actually post different social media updates on the different networks and it’s going to create the schedule for you and all you have to do is click a button putting your social media post tweet whatever it is can automatically push that out based upon the schedule it’s got some really deep analytics that I really like so for me I go when there it says how much my audience grew in the last month or something like that and how your tweets and posts and all that kind of suffer performing I think that’s actually very cool as well normally this is five bucks per social network you attached to it however AppSumo has a deal right now for $49 and they have another package that’s $99 I’ve gone ahead and already purchased the $99 package it’s more related to to an agency and what’s really night now nice about that is you can create projects and a project will have certain social media accounts linked to that it can also link into your Google analytics account for the website so can give you some really good analytics package and then what you can do is you can say have a the intention of it is if you’re an agency right in your doing social media for business is so you can actually give them up a login to come in and approve things at different posts and stuff like that it’s actually really neat what it does I’m not given injustice in this explanation but it allows you to have the pro package of five $99 lifetime account and it’s can allow you to have five different projects 50 different social accounts linked into those five projects so another way of thinking about that for me my WP crafters one project this other [email protected] is another project so I can have multiple projects there and have it all be separate there’s a mobile app for it which I like a lot now there are some weaknesses in it number one it doesn’t have this content repository so I can put a bucket of peace is a content that I wanted to auto recycle however they have said that they’re going to be adding that which hopefully they do because that’s one thing things I want is the ability to auto recycle some of the content that I put out but what I like is I can just whip out my iPhone I can open up the app and I can put some kind of a message in there and have it just be shot out to all my social networks I really like that feature in this a lot there also adding an import feature so what I can do is take all of my posts and I can import it and then I can tweak out the text that goes along with it and then have those auto report posted every so often to bring some attention to some of my older content that is still relevant and another nice thing it does is it has something called RSS feed so if I go to my website I created a new blog post as soon as I click on publish it will get pushed out to herein then it will automatically syndicated so this is amplifier is simply something to check out to definitely when it’s in AppSumo deal and it’s a one time fee it’s definitely worth taking in a look at they do have a 60 day return policy to AppSumo’s well I have a link to the specific deal down below but this is what I am actually testing out right now the next thing is this other service called social pilot and this is going to have a monthly fee but this already has those buckets where you can auto recycle content and auto posted so just take a quick look at the cost here a lot of people recommend this a growth hacker package right here to be about 20 bucks per month next let’s take a look at the one that is probably the most well known and most widely used from some people that have a really strong social media presence and that is meet Ed [email protected] and this does a lot of things the right way and a lot of what this does is I am hoping gets built into and is Artie been committed to be built into amplifier this right here is going to have a monthly cost of $50 per month but one of the limitations here is it only supports these three social networks Facebook twitter and linked in’s you might want more social networks than that that’s one of the benefits of amplifier they definitely support more services and if I was to pay for service outside of amplifier I amplifiers number one on my list I think the one platform that is the most comprehensive that gets it all right in every regard is smarter cubes this thing is a beast it’s beautiful the interface is beautiful it has every feature you could probably want in a social media platform and this is definitely the one to get in its very affordable as well so let’s get down to the pricing right here and they have three different packages right here so I think for most people the business package here is going to be the want to get I’m showing you the monthly prices here is the price if you pay per year essentially is 15% off let’s just look at the monthly pricing right here seven agency business in a solo I think really this business plan is the one that you would probably want it has the ability to queue up to a thousand post it’s going to have that recycling of content you get this beautiful calendar grid where you can see what’s going out when this is really the one to go want to get if you’re fine with the monthly fee the 40 bucks per month or whatever it’s going to end up being now I went with amplifier because I’m not really excited I want to improve my social media presence but I’m not really excited about spending $500 a year to do it and you still have to do the work is so got a load of create the content load the content up that’s why I chose to go with amplifier so there’s so many different social media tools out there there so many platforms plug-ins and all that I had went through 10 of them right here so I like some I didn’t like and I give you reasons why I want to hear what you’re using what your experience is with it down in the comment section below if there’s something I said something favorable about and you had a bad experience let me know if there’s something I said was bad and you’re using it and it’s been good let me know that as well hey thank you for watching this video will have all the links in the description box below thanks for watching