Make Your Site More Social with Jetpack

Note: Publicize is now auto-share and is part of Jetpack Social.

Whether you want more followers, brand awareness, or increased sales, you need to strengthen your social media presence.

Social media is the bread and butter of small business advertising and blog promotion. It helps you connect to and interact with others on a personal level by sharing posts and starting conversations.

Because of social media’s increasingly important role, Jetpack offers various tools to help you reach more people across those social networks. From sharing buttons, to social media widgets that can be directly inserted into headers or sidebars, these features — along with a smart social media strategy — will attract new customers, and keep your existing fans coming back for more.

Want to learn how to grow your social presence with Jetpack? Keep reading!

Why being social is important

Research shows that the average person will spend more than five years of their life on social media sites. Clearly, it’s important that your business reaches out to people on platforms other than your website. If your site can get people’s attention on social media, you’re more likely to attract customers.

Social media is where people gather on the internet to have fun, share interests, and receive updates about the things that they care about. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are where trends are born, and where many purchasing decisions are made.

Building a social media strategy has exponential returns, too. Once you’ve established a steady following, fans will share your posts with their own friends and followers, resulting in a wider audience that could be interested in your blog or business. Social media can be a major factor in growing your online presence… but you need to encourage people to follow you in the first place.

Jetpack’s social media tools will help you do just that! But first, let’s think a little bit about your strategy.

Who do you want to follow you, and where?

To begin developing a social media strategy, consider your ideal customer. A large group of your ideal customers is often called a target audience.

Every social media channel has its own demographic, so you may want to tailor your outreach. Perhaps your Twitter account is the best way to announce upcoming sales and last minute store closures due to bad weather, while your Instagram is the place to post photos of the cupcakes sold at your bakery.

It’s also important to consider which platforms your target audience favors. If you’re selling hand-painted pottery, you may want to share photos of your work and process with the crafting enthusiasts of Pinterest. But, if you’re a freelance graphic designer, you would be better off marketing your skills to the business audience of LinkedIn.

Once you’ve decided which channels to use and how to tailor your approach, Jetpack’s social media tools can help drive the right people to your social feeds.

Widgets will drive followers to your feeds

Don’t assume that people have the time or patience to search for your individual social media accounts — even if they’re genuinely interested in your content. This is why it’s critical to include links to your social media platforms on your site’s homepage. But, manually writing your handles on every single page or post is annoying, not to mention unattractive from a design standpoint.

Enter Jetpack’s social media widgets. A widget is a small container that adds special functionality to your site, typically appearing on your sidebar, footer, or other widgetized areas within your theme.

Jetpack supports plenty of popular social media networks.

Social media widgets allow you to link to each of your social platforms by displaying the platform’s icon — Twitter’s bird, Facebook’s “f,” etc. — on every single page. This gives your site a sleek, dynamic method of driving visitors to your social media accounts from any post or page across your site.

Jetpack currently offers support for the following social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, GitHub, YouTube, Vimeo, WordPress, Flickr, and Google+.

It’s easy to add the icons of your choice to a widgetized area — for example, your theme’s sidebar. In the Appearance menu, navigate to Widgets and click the “Social Media Icons” widget to add it to your sidebar. It will look something like this:

Here’s how your social icons would appear in a sidebar.

You can drag it further up the sidebar by going back to Widgets.

Alternatively, try adding the Social Media Icons widget to your footer:

You can also add your social icons to your footer so anyone arriving at the bottom of your site’s theme can find them.

Consistently engage with your audience

In addition to driving more people to your social media sites with the help of widgets, Jetpack provides tools that encourage them to further engage with your content.

One of these is Publicize. This feature lets you automatically share new blog posts across your social media accounts, making it easy to keep your feeds updated. This encourages fans to read your posts and share it with their own networks.

Publicize eliminates the need to manually share each of your new posts across all of your social channels, while helping you maintain a consistent publishing schedule. A consistent social sharing schedule will also give readers a reason to return, as they can expect to see new content coming from a thought leader like yourself.

Once your blog posts are read by fans on social media, they may want to share them to their own Facebook and Twitter feeds. Jetpack’s Sharing feature lets you place social sharing icons at the end of your posts so that readers can easily share them by clicking a button. You should view shares from enthusiastic fans as further opportunities to promote your business and brand.

Add sharing buttons to your content to see it distributed even further.

Your new goal: be a social butterfly!

Social media is critical for growing your site’s online presence. By taking advantage of Jetpack’s social features, you can elevate your online presence to the next level.

The more that you post to social media, the stronger your relationships with readers will become. This typically results in increased sales, better customer experiences, and developing a great reputation for your brand.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Jetpack can help you develop a thorough social media strategy. To learn more about growing your social media presence with Jetpack, check out the full list of available features.

Do you use social media widgets and other tools to boost your brand? We’d love to hear about it!

Linda Scott

Director at Silicon Dales.