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The Hypocrite’s Guide to Social Sharing – WPCAST021

October 29, 2014

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!

http://media.blubrry.com/wpcast/wpcast.fm/wp-content/blogs.dir/483/files/episodes/WPCAST021.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:55 — 22.9MB)

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!

http://media.blubrry.com/wpcast/wpcast.fm/wp-content/blogs.dir/483/files/episodes/WPCAST021.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:55 — 22.9MB)

Thanks for listening! If you liked this episode, please leave us a review in iTunes.

We’d love for you to comment below, or leave us a voicemail or message with your feedback.

Filed Under: Podcast • Tagged With: buffer, digg digg, facebook, google plus, hootsuite, linkedin, social, social metrics, socialize, twitter

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