You know how twitter posts with links to major newspaper and magazine sites have nice big pictures and when you click or tap on those pics they take you directly to an article or post on their site? I finally set up some of our wordpress blogs with a plugin to make our “X” fka Twitter posts more powerful and easier to post by functioning in this way.
While you can do some hand-coding to make twitter cards work on your site, I chose to follow WPBeginner’s advice here:
Beginners Guide on How to Add Twitter Cards in WordPress
Note: the article emphasizes the benefit of getting more attribution/credit and therefore more followers by using twitter cards rather than what I think is valuable (MORE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE, and less time stuck on twitter). That’s because the vast majority of people posting on social media DO NOT HAVE WHAT YOU HAVE as a webwhore: their own unique and valuable visually-stimulating content and ways to make money on it, so they’re only thinking about ego metrics.
Promoting your site and blog posts with alluring posts on social media like “X”/Twitter can be time-consuming, ineffective, and even counter-productive. You waste time trying to get people to follow your links by posting juicy images, but almost everyone justs opens/expands/enlarges the images within “X”/Twitter without ever clicking your link. So even with outstanding well-liked and much-viewed content, very few people actually take your invitation to leave Twitter’s platform and visit your link. They’re clicking on your images but not clicking on your links.
Even more frustrating and unprofitable is that these folks stay on Elon Musk’s site to reply and message you, and want you to stay there too, interacting for free with largely unqualified leads. It is distracting and time-consuming (and therefore costly) to reply to their comments and DMs, and counterproductive since they’re getting the good engagement feels and reactions from you right there for free on the social media platform without needing to go somewhere else for those kinds of satisfying interactions most of us are trying to sell, reducing their motivation to click away from the stream of hundreds and thousands of people doing exactly the same thing. And then it’s also costly to NOT reply to or acknowledge them, making them feel ignored, unappreciated, and unseen on this place where richer, smarter, and/or more coked up webwhores than you are hammering out emojis and/or employing bots or behind-the-curtains assistants to do that monotonous dirty work for them. I’m not saying you shouldn’t interact with your customers, I’m just saying that if interaction is part of your job you should do it on a platform where you get paid for it, or are able to convert it in some way to sales, ad-views, etc.
You might be doing great at getting engagement on social media platforms like Twitter, and we all know that more engagement means more views (unless of course you’re shadow-banned, as most of us with adult content are), but what is the point if it’s not generating sales? What good is it if just alienates your followers or makes them resent you, or suspect there’s nobody there since you aren’t throwing hearts up on everything they say and giving them individualized attention when they reply with compliments or questions?
Enabling Twitter cards helps a ton by automating the most graphic and seductive part of your promo posts, and making those images function as compelling thumbnails leading directly to your content on your own platform when tapped. Your featured image on your blog posts acts as a “read/see more” link to the place you’re trying to get them to go.
You can use the same or similar plugin(s) and methods for Facebook, but I don’t fuck with FB. “X” is still the best of all the big social media platforms for maintaining a following and promoting your work to people who are actual fans. Even at its most unfriendly, it is still the friendliEST to sex workers, and more effective than older and current adults-only sites, forums and platforms for advertising your site, store, blog or fan page.
I’m not holding my breath thinking any of this will last / long or continue to function in the same way forever, but for now this is an easy way to harness your unique content and social media following to pull traffic to your monetized self-hosted wordpress sites and blog posts. Twitter cards are formatted in a standardized way that looks recognizable and builds on established trust and users’ sense of mastery to overcome resistance they have to leaving their stream and going to your website. When you post a twitter card enabled link on “X” you no longer have to try to entice someone to tap on a text link; they’re going to automatically do it since they’re conditioned to tap on the image in your post before anything, and VOILA! You’ve also pulled them away from that easy-to-hit reply function, which is great since the reaction you want most is a SALE or a SIGN-UP.
Even if you are trying to promote a non-wordpress site or page, I think it’s worth setting up a wordpress blog specifically for posting promos showcasing your work on your own platform. Even if it’s just to catalog and archive your ads, it is worth having a backup location (and preferably your own dot com) where all of that goes FIRST so you have your banners, your best pics, your best promo text, etc. in case your fanpage gets shut down or you change tactics and/or you need to make announcements about those things and want a little more control over how it’s presented, and a place where fans associate you with YOU, rather than a blue on white social media platform where everybody stands the same size under the same umbrella and branding.
The goal of posting on “X” fka twitter as a webwhore should not be to get more followers, more replies, more notoriety, or more likes. The goal is not to make Elon Musk’s platform more content rich and valuable. The goal of posting is to get traffic to someplace where you can make sales and earn money. You can do that better with Twitter cards and wordpress posts featuring your enticing images that you now no longer have to individually select and upload to your status updates, crossing your fingers your followers will not only click on your pics, but also your link (which almost always ends up taking a backseat to hearts, replies, DMs … and, more commonly, just swiping to the next hottie with pics).
