Here’s my social media philosophy: make it stupid easy.
By that I mean, if you want people to do something for you, you have to make it as easy as possible for them to make it happen. Remove the barriers. For example, if you want people to send you an email, make it really easy for them to do that–don’t use a contact form, use a clickable link. If you want people to comment, ask them to comment, and don’t make them go through some big signup procedure to do so. If you want them to “Like” your Facebook page, install a Facebook “Like” box in the sidebar of your blog so they can like your page without leaving your site.
Enough examples already!
There’s a new WordPress plugin I’m loving, because it makes it really easy for you to produce pithy pull-quotes that your audience can tweet from their account.
Here’s how (this ONLY works on self-hosted WP blogs):
- Log in to your dashboard. In the main, left-hand menu, click on “Plugins” –> “Add new.”
- Search for “Click to Tweet.” Install and activate the plugin.
- You’ll find the plugin settings under your “Settings” menu. Add your twitter handle here.
- In the “Visual” tab (WYSIWYG editing), place your mouse where you want the quote to go. Then click on the ‘click to tweet button that’s been added to your Kitchen sink (looks like a twitter bird). A popup will come up, enter your tweet, and hit “ok.”
- Click to Tweet will automatically truncate your text to 120 characters and add your @twitter handle.
This is what it looks like in the body of your blog post:
And this is what it looks like when it’s tweeted:
Cool, right?