The Hypocrite’s Guide to Social Sharing – WPCAST021

This week’s episode is all about social sharing. We talk about strategies and best practices for social – many of which we’ve been lazy in implementing ourselves (hence the title).

We’re now an award-winning podcast. Thanks Dan and Ian at TropicalMBA! We got the “Best New Podcast” award at the DCBKK conference.

And thanks everyone for getting us over 10,000 downloads!

The Core

Best Practices

• Optimize your profiles and pages:
  • Include link to site, logo, interesting background image or banner.
  • Make Tweets sticky.
  • Lead Generation Cards for capturing email addresses.
  • Social Sizing Cheat Sheet for finding the various dimensions for social networks.
• Recommended networks: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn (niche-specific).
• Don’t spread yourself too thin between channels, focus on the relevant ones.
• Personal vs. business account?
• Follow and mention people, deep link to posts on their site – good chance of getting a retweet.
• Use a service like HootSuite or Buffer to post to multiple channels, schedule tweets and posts.

Technical Implementation

• Implementing it yourself
  • Facebook Like Box widget generator
  • Twitter buttons and widgets generator
• Problems:
  • Load time. Each button checks back with the appropriate service to get the share count.
  • Negative social proof. Show social counts if 0 or a low number?
  • Don’t display social sharing buttons at the very top, before people read?
  • Will they dilute or distract from your call to action?
  • Limited customization options.
• Plugins:
  • Socialize: Doug’s recommendation, most customization options and call to action boxes.
  • Digg Digg: easier to set up out of the box, more popular, but limited customization.
  • Social Metrics: for tracking share counts across posts and pages.
• Do you even need social sharing buttons?
• Doug is considering building a premium social plugin. Are you interested in these features?
  • Cached share counts.
  • Automatically shows/hides the numbers if the share count is above/below a set amount.
  • Custom color picker.

Follow us on Twitter: David at @davidhme and Doug at @Doug_Yuen.

Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!