Setting Up Social Networking Options in Your Website

Originally Posted on May 20, 2014 Last Updated on August 13, 2014

Note: This post is for clients of mine who’ve had their site built since May 20th, 2014, or who’ve gone through the process of updating an older site with these new options. Not a client? Get in touch, maybe we can change that.

Your website has a variety of options that allow you to improve how your site is displayed on social networks, who gets credit for what, and tracking information for your Google Analytics account.

This here post is ready, set and raring to show you how all of this works.

There are three different places this information is set, depending on what level of content we’re at. Let’s dive it on in.

Theme Settings

In WordPress, navigate to Settings > Theme Settings.

This is the area where you can setup (or change what I’ve setup for you) your site-wide social networking settings. Let’s do a little run through of what everything here is, what should be in there, and what it’s used for.

Twitter Username

This should be your primary Twitter account. Mine is @clicknathan. Don’t forget the @ symbol. This is injected into your site’s code to tell Twitter, “if someone shares any page on my site, credit the page to this Twitter account.” If you’ve got both an individual Twitter account for you as a person, and another for your company, you can enter the company account here and your individual account below. If you don’t have a company account, just enter your personal twitter account here.

Twitter Creator

As mentioned just above, this field is only necessary if you entered a company Twitter account in the Twitter Username above. What this field does is says, “Hey Twitter, even though my company gets credit for this page, also give me as an individual credit for creating this page.”

Facebook Page

Enter the URL to your Facebook Page. Note that this should probably not be your personal Facebook account, but rather a business page you create.

Facebook Admin ID

Enter your Facebook Admin ID, a number that represents you on Facebook. I explain how to find that number here. This tells Facebook that you should be able to see various insights on how your page is being shared when on Facebook itself.

Additional Facebook Admin ID

You can enter one additional admin, using the same process as described directly above, if you want to give someone else the ability to see this information as well.

Google Plus Publisher

This is only applicable if you have a business page on Google+. Enter the complete URL to the homepage, I provide an example inline on the Theme Settings page itself. After you enter this number, you also need to go into your Google+ page and do the following:

Look for the You are a manager of this page. text, and click the Manage this Page link.
Then look for the Edit Page link, which as of this post’s creation is at the bottom of the first box where you can see your page’s photo.
Go to the Links box and click Edit.
In the Website field, enter your website’s URL, like http://mywebsite.com

You can then go to this page, enter your site’s URL, and see if it’s all setup correctly.

Google Analytics

Enter your Google Analytics account ID here. Google explains how to find this number on this page.

Your Profile

Next up, you can set a few individual settings for yourself, and any other users on your site who have the ability to create content.

Just go to Users > Your Profile to edit these. Scroll down to the Social Authoring Information section.

Google+ URL: Just like you did for your Google+ Publisher page above, enter your personal Google+ page URL, and then follow the same instructions to setup your website on that page as well.
Twitter Username: Enter in your personal Twitter account. This is similar to the Twitter Creator setting above, but you can do this for every person on your website who can create content, and they’ll each get the individual credit.

Content Creation Pages

Here I’m referring to when you create a new Post, Page (or other type of content if applicable to your site), or edit an existing one.

Title Tag: This field is primarily used for SEO purposes, to give you the ability to customize the headline that is shown on Google search results, but it will also be used as the headline that’s displayed on Google+, Twitter and Facebook when your content is shared there.
Meta Description: In addition to giving you control over the text snippet that shows on Google search results pages, this will also change the text displayed on Google+, Twitter and Facebook.
Featured Image: This has various functionality depending on your site’s custom setup, but it will also determine what image is shown on Google+, Twitter and Facebook when your site is shared.

Question? Give me a shout!.

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