Setting up social media metrics tracking

The final element of our social media integration puzzle is to set up some kind of tracking mechanism that will tell us how popular our content is on social media (in terms of shares).

Granted, you can do this manually by going to each of your posts and checking their share numbers individually. However, there's a quicker method, and it involves another plugin. This one is called Social Metrics Tracker, and you can download it at https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-metrics-tracker/.

In short, this plugin collects social shares data from a number of platforms and displays it to you in a single readable dashboard view. After you install and activate the plugin, you'll need to give it a couple of minutes to crawl through your social media accounts and get the data. Soon after that, you will be able to visit the plugin's dashboard by going to the Social Metrics section in wp-admin:

For some web hosts and setups, this plugin might end up consuming too much of the server's resources. If this happens, consider activating it only occasionally to check your results and then deactivate it again. Doing this even once a week will still give you a great overview of how well your content is performing on social media.

This ends our short guide on how to integrate your WordPress site with social media. I'll admit that we're just scratching the surface here, and there's a lot more that can be done. There are new social media plugins being released almost every week, and describing every single one of them would fill a book of its own. That being said, the methods described here are more than enough to make your WordPress site social media friendly and enable you to share your content effectively with your friends, family, and audience.