It’s hard to deny that President Obama has moved social communications forward in the political sphere. In the wake of his re-election, many articles discussed how his marketing teams directly leveraged social networks like Tumblr and Reddit to reach out to voters and constituents. Today, President Obama was sworn in for a second term in front of the nation with the ceremony being broadcasted on TV, radio, and livetweeted at #Inaug2013.
The livetweeting of the inauguration is yet another example of how social networks are being used to broadcast the information we would have expected on the evening news. Decisions like this by the presidential communications both compliment and challenge the old media. Ultimately, it also allows broader access to an increasingly connected society. If the last four years of Obama’s communications team is any indication, the next four years will continue to be innovative in the context of the relationship between politics and social media.
3 ESSENTIAL WORDPRESS TOOLS AND PLUGINS THAT HELP SOCIALIZE YOUR BLOG
There’s no doubt about it – nowadays, the WordPress CMS (Content Management System) is an essential platform to any business website. Back in the day, WordPress was mostly a blogging platform, but it’s evolved so much over the years to become a platform for business websites, portfolios, and even small social networks. Its framework is SEO optimized and highly customizable by anyone with PHP, CSS, HTML, and/or little jQuery/Javascript knowledge.
What’s great about the WP platform is that it’s backed by a huge and active community, and is therefore constantly updated with the latest internet technology like HTML5, CSS3, and Responsiveness. Because of this large online support, there are over 20,000 plugins available, ranging from social media widgets to fancy visual sliders. In this article we’ll go over 3 essential WordPress plugins that can help socialize your blog or site. More about Tiktok For Vlogs
ShareThis is an essential plugin for anyone that wants to enable Social Media sharing on their WP site. It works by showing up as a vertical or horizontal bar of social media icons on a blog post or page. The reader can then share the page or post to separate social networks by clicking on the corresponding icon.
The admin of the plugin can choose which icons/social networks to appear – it’s also relatively simple to setup and doesn’t require the WordPress theme to be manually edited. Simply tell the plugin which types of pages you want it to show up on, choose orientation, icon type, location of page, and more. Sharing stats are also available so that the admin can track everything.
WP to Twitter is an extremely useful tool for anyone that actively uses Twitter to promote their blog or website. The plugin shows up as a sidebar in the WP admin panel when editing and creating post.
When the plugin is enabled, it’ll create a tweet based off of the headline of your page or post, and add hashtags based on any of the wordpress tags you’ve applied – and sends out the tweet once you publish or your page/post. It’s very customizable and is a great way to save time when posting your WordPress content to Twitter.
If you’re making the switch from Tumblr over to the more superior and feature heavy WordPress, Tumblr Importer is for you. When installed, the plugin works much like the other Import tools in WP – by importing Tumblr posts, drafts, pages and media. It even works in the background if you want it to.
