Unit 17: How to Turn Your Email or Blog into a Social Media Hub

Introduction:

Feeling overwhelmed with social media and all its buzzwords? It's true that managing all your social media accounts even for personal use (let alone for business) can become a full-time job.

For this reason, plenty has been written about turning your email inbox or blog into a social media hub. Services have even been created to enable you to send a single email to all your social media channels.

There are many ways to tie social media into your site, each of which could constitute a separate course in itself! However, I want to leave you with these two resources to give you some idea of where you can take your blog from here in terms of its promotion:

Posting automatically to all of your social media accounts

We have already talked about plug-ins, so give this plug-in a try to achieve social media integration:

NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster.

As you can see from the screenshots, it lets you tie in all your social media accounts into WordPress using "API keys" or "App ID's." You have to obtain the API key or App ID from each respective social media service, and then go to the plug-in settings in WordPress and add them in for each service. Once all set up, every time you make a new post in WordPress, it automatically gets published to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc... newsfeeds.

The WordPress phone app

If you have a smartphone, I really recommend going to the App or Play store and downloading the official WordPress app. It has a condensed version of the WP admin interface, but where it is really useful is that it lets you blog or post on the go. You can microblog by snapping photos with your smartphone and doing a brief write-up with the photos. When you have the above plug-in set up as well, once you publish your post from your phone, it will get shot out to all your social media channels simultaneously. This way, you will keep your content really current and fresh with minimal effort!

Here is the app for Android and iPhone.