WordPress Sharing Plugin

To build coverage on Facebook & Co Sharing Buttons are ideal. With them, your website visitors can share your content. But beware! The sharing plugins of Facebook & Co are often not GDPR compliant. Therefore, we have integrated into our SEO plugin 18 individually configurable, privacy and performance optimized sharing functions (including widget).

Optimization

For better presentation of your website in social sharing you can define individual social media metadata (in the jargon “Open Graph Metadata” or “Meta-OG” for short). This will allow you to define the title, description and thumbnail that will be displayed when sharing your page on Facebook, Twitter & Co.

Since static pages are often shared less often than current posts, we recommend that you start by optimizing your blog posts. The background to this is that static pages usually only present offers and company information that are less recommendable than current (and often more interesting) blog posts.

You see in the content overviews of WordPress in the column SEO as well as in the header during content editing now the button Social, if the module is active:

  • If the social button is yellow, the social media metadata was generated only from those in the classic metadata and not manually optimized. Although you can also live with the automatic social media metadata, but some social media like Facebook shorten your titles and descriptions, which is why we recommend you to share all content with “sharing potential” to maintain the meta-OG manually.
  • If the button is green then you have manually optimized the social media metadata. It’s best to move within our limits so your social titles and descriptions will not be cut off while sharing.

Settings

  1. Define a default preview image of your website if you do not want (any) images of your content to appear when sharing. The preview image has best dimensions of 470 x 246px (W x H). However, if you want to use individual thumbnails, please leave the default thumbnail free.
  2. If you have a Facebook company page or an official Twitter channel, you can enter the Facebook page URL and the Twitter name here. By clicking on “View page” you can check if the link is correct. This setting means that when you share your website content your channels will be linked and users will be able to follow you directly.
  3. To test your current Open Graph data, we recommend Facebook’s Debug Tool and Twitter’s Card Validator. Please make sure your website cache is disabled or emptied when working with both tools. On Twitter you need to sign up to unlock your page for Twitter Cards before you can use the validator.
  4. Then select the features and networks you want to use. You can also play individual features only for desktop or mobile devices. Whatsapp makes little sense on desktop machines, because the number of users with the desktop version of Whatsapp is still very manageable.
  5. Then define how many buttons should be displayed in a row. After the number then a line break takes place. We recommend you to use the buttons either single-line or single-column. By dragging and dropping you can then change the order of the buttons.
  6. You can then under the plus sign make general styling settings, such as the radius of the button corners. If you click on the paintbrush next to a function, you can change the designation, the colors and also the counters (we do not have them active because SEO content is not so viral and we are ashamed if we have only a few shares ).
  7. Last but not least, you are incorporating the social sharing buttons in your website. Best in the visible range. But it would also be possible the footer and below the individual posts. You can use the shortcode, PHP code or our WordPress widget. A collection of the codes can be found on GitHub.

Own Sharing

In addition to the social media metadata and the share buttons, you should of course lead by example and share your own content. Do not just post the link and especially not automated, but use individual status messages to tell your users something about the context, for example. Remember also that people are mainly using their friends and inspiration for Facebook & Co. This means that clumsy advertising mail is filtered out very quickly and you should be entitled to inspire people or tell them something new.

Next tutorial: Text optimization