There are a lot of beginner web investors who spend their lifetime savings or thousands of dollars in order to become a web tycoon. They make all the possible efforts to bring traffic and generate business profits. As a fact, they get desirable traffic but fail to make it stay on their websites due to only one missing factor i.e. social engagement. Social Engagement Optimization is the concept of devising strategies for optimizing your website with respect to social engagement. These include driving more traffic by improving their interest (not link building), engaging people to increase their time of stay on your website, and encouraging them to participate and share your content on social networking sites. Here we have briefly described the concept of social engagement.

What is Social Engagement?

Social engagement can be simply defined as engagement, contribution or participation of a community in society or social cause. In digital terms, it is the scale of contribution of a group, community or number of people on social media. The measure of social engagement differs from one network to the other. For example, for Twitter social engagement is the number of mentions, tags, retweets, and replies. For Facebook, social engagement is the number of shares, likes and comments. Statistical backend measurements include measuring the number of visits, views and the time of a visitor to stay on the post or content. For blogs, social engagement is the number of people participating in a debate with likes, dislikes and comments. The number of shares is also tracked to estimate social engagement. The number of visits, views and time of stay are included in the list of Observers and not Socially Engaged Community. Both categories require different approaches to plan out the business goals. As a fact, all content is not engaging on the social media. It requires adequate planning and formulating the content to involve people in the activity. Social engagement is important to improve your ranking on social media as SEO is more clearly defined as Social Engagement Optimization rather than Search Engine Optimization. Social engagement helps you track the feedback of audiences and plan out your marketing goals with respect to their feedback. It also helps you grow your business by expanding your customer base or business community.

WordPress Plugins for Social Engagement Optimization

If you have developed your website on WordPress then you can leverage from the benefits of various WordPress plugins to improve your Social Engagement Optimization strategy. Given here is a list of 7 WordPress plugins to improve social engagement on your website.

1. CommentLuv Premium

CommentLuv Premium comes with a number of benefits for your comments section. Its free version is also available so that you can initially try to understand its benefits. After installing CommentLuv Premium, you can unlock countless benefits including: blocking spam comments and spammers from commenting, linking control rewards for interlinking comments, customizing the control of link posting in comments and generating comment sections stats on a click.

2. Gravity Forms

WordPress makes it easier for the website owners to fully control and operate their websites without paying extra to web developers and engineers. CSS and HTML coding is required to add forms to your websites that directly connect with your inbox. These forms can be made without coding simply by installing Gravity Forms plugin. Without requiring technical expertise, the Gravity Forms can also be customized according to the needs of your customer base. It can also be easily integrated and customized for other purposes including email marketing  

3. Facebook Like Box and Twitter@Anywhere

According to a recent post by Mark Zuckerberg, more than 1 billion people logged in to their Facebook accounts on Monday, August 24, 2015. According to Mark, it is a big milestone that 1 in 7 people on Earth connected with their friends and families on Facebook, which he celebrated by posting a thanks video later on. The stats show that Facebook is the most used social networking site. Facebook Like Box shows the profile pictures and the names of people, relating to the profile of visitors to encourage them becoming a part of their business community. Twitter@Anywhere plugin performs the similar function for Twitter users.

4. All in One SEO (or Yoast) for SEO

All in One SEO (or Yoast) are WordPress plugins which provide you SEO tools and guidelines to use them. You can also find easy-to-understand guides for understanding the use of them on search engines. Both the plugins perform similar functions and end your SEO hunt with measurably great results. They provide you Google authorship to connect your Google+ account with the posts on website and improve your credibility for Google crawlers. They link your content with Google Webmaster tools for optimization. They provide you meta information for search engine optimization and also display statistical review of your posts after utilizing their optimization tools. In other words, they take responsibility of SEO and perform all SEO functions for your business.

5. ReplyMe

Nobody would want to check your website all over again to review the responses of their comments in a discussion. People want updates about their contributions which can be provided with the help of ReplyMe. The plugin automatically sends an email to the commentators whenever someone likes their comment or replies to it. With ReplyMe, you can bring back socially inactive contributors to your website.

6. ShareBar

Social networking sites are amazing to bring more audience to your website or engage the users in discussions. ShareBar plugin allows you to display sharing options for Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites at the end of each post. You can also customize it to change the buttons or remove a few. Although WordPress allows you to show the sharing options but customizable ShareBar allows you to make one of the most used parts of your website unique and independent.

7.  nRelate Related Content

As Google has become stricter in terms of linkbuilding, a better way is to use WordPress plugin to bring users related content. With nRelate Related Content, you don’t need to hyperlink statements or words. It is a simple but amazing plugin which not only increases the time of stay on your website but also provide a default view of related posts in the form of thumbnails. With the given WordPress plugins, you don’t need to spend extra time, money and energy in planning for social engagement optimization. Remember that you can engage the users with content and comments. Make sure that you provide informational content to the end users for improving their interest in your website.