Into the Driver's Seat

The New Year is a great time to either start a brand new blog or revamp your exiting website. One of the ways to improve your blog in 2012 is by using plugins that make it more social media optimized and SEO friendly.

Having the right plugins can give you an edge over other blogs and can also assist you in gaining the extra functionality you need for your WordPress-powered site, especially if social media is an important part of your marketing strategy. Let’s have a look at the top plugins that I recommend you utilize in 2012. There’s a few new plugins in the mix together with several plugins that I recommended in my Best 2011 WordPress Plugins for Social Media and SEO that you’ll want to reference if you haven’t done so.

Social Media WordPress Plugins for 2012

There are many ways to utilize the power of social media to help spread the word about your blog posts. The 3 essential types of plugins you need to have here that I cover below are social sharing, social commenting, and integrating Twitter:

Read more: http://windmillnetworking.com/2012/01/10/best-wordpress-plugins-social-media-seo-2012/

After creating content -- whether it's a blog post, an ebook, a webinar, or a video -- it's important to promote that content through social media channels.

And when you do promote that content in social media, you cross your fingers that it generates a ton of shares, tweets, and interaction. For the sake of Twitter, if you follow a few simple best practices, more people are likely to retweet and spread the distribution of your content, giving it a much broader reach and a better opportunity to get found by a new audience of prospective customers beyond your direct followers. Marketers should know how to retweet the right way, but it's also critical for them to learn how to get others to retweet their content, too.

11 Tips for Getting People to Retweet Your Content...

While Facebook and Google Plus social continue to push new features live, battling themselves over who can dominate the market, Twitter remains the most powerful driver of traffic to my site.

Ever since the t.co shortener was introduced, I can see it showing up at the top of my referrers at any given day.

This is very powerful and also quite reassuring. Continuing to improve and work on my Twitter performance has paid off greatly so far.