Moran Media

Graphic Design and Instruction

wordpress

Marketing Monday: make shared blog posts look good

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FB

 

When you post to your blog, you can share to facebook, twitter, google plus, and other outlets there are small previews that show up on social media (as seen in the images above).  Every few cycles it seems like things change, but for now, this is how posts on facebook look.  You will notice that the posting on the left looks much more attractive, something you will want to click on more than the one on the right. (And if your post doesn’t have an image, the odds of people clicking it are pretty slim, people like pictures over just text). Screen shot 2014-11-18 at 8.17.15 PM

Screen shot 2014-11-18 at 8.15.35 PMHow can you make facebook links look pretty like this?

I have discovered through trial and error that what you need to do is when you add an image to your blog post* you need to post the full size image, not the small or medium image. (as seen in the image to the left) This works best with images over 600 or 800 pixels in width.  Using the featured image option in wordpress also helps. (As you can see from the image on the right.)

*Assuming you are using a wordpress install as your blogging platform which is what I recommend to all of my customers.  If I built a website with blogging enabled, then it is built upon the wordpress software.

You can always change the image size once you posted into the blog post by clicking on the pencil icon on your image and typing in the size you want, as seen below.

Screen shot 2014-11-18 at 8.38.39 PMThis also works on tumblr and google plus, look below for the examples of both using the medium and the full size image formats. Thankfully twitter just handles all images the same way.

google tumblr

 

Any questions?  

Marketing Monday: Scheduling posts with wordpress

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calendarI’ve spoken about scheduling before, mentioned how I often write these posts ahead of time and set them to post on mondays so I don’t get behind.  This helps because I will get spurts of time and writing energy, and can pile up posts.  This post will be the third in my current queue.

How do I schedule posts? Well if you have a website set up by me, you most likely have a wordpress install.  I like using wordpress because it’s easy, it’s clean code, it’s open source, and again, it’s easy.  You don’t have to know code to use it, all you need to be able to do is to use a word processing program and you can use wordpress.

There are two forms of wordpress: .com and .org. WordPress.com is the free (with the option of paid extras) blogging website that you log into wordpress.com to write your posts, and your site is likely yoursitename.wordpress.com. WordPress.org is where you download the program wordpress from and install onto your webhost, make database files, and set up the same software but with more functionality, on your own site and your site is more likely yoursitename.com (or .org, .net, .info, ect.). This is what I install for many of my clients.

Screen shot 2014-11-04 at 4.17.28 PMIn both variations you can schedule posts.  You fill out your post as you normally would, enter a post title, add and image, write your post, fill out categories, tags, SEO, and more.  The only difference is you are going to choose when to post.  On the right side of your posting window you will see what I have in the image on the right. Under Publish immediately you will see a blue link that says edit, click that and you can enter the month, the day, the year, and the time you’d like to post.  Once you click OK the big blue publish button turns to schedule.  Once you click that your post is saved but won’t post until that date.  If you make the date in the past, it will post immediately but be backlogged amongst posts from the date you chose as if you had written it then.

Thanks to the scheduling option of wordpress you can time travel throughout your site. This helps when planning time off, or dealing with busy workloads you know are coming.  For example, I have a bi-annual project I work on that I clear my schedule for, my goal is to have posts ready for those weeks so my audience is still getting content even though I can’t stop what I’m doing to write it then. With the publishing tools on wordpress the post still gets pushed to facebook, twitter, google plus, linkedin, and all the social media I try to engage. (Well talk more about that in the future.)

What do you use the schedule tool for most?