I had always been wondering how bloggers gain k’s of Facebook Likes and Twitter followers. My blog miapple.me stagnated at around 100 Facebook Likes and 100 Twitter followers for years, although the traffic increased to thousands of page views per day.
Then, it was one day in November 2014, I stumbled on the WordPress Plugin Social Locker by Onepress and everything turned:
4 months later I got +3k Facebook Likes and +1k Twitter followers!
But how does it work?
Social Locker is a WordPress plugin that locks your most valuable site content behind a set of social buttons until the visitor likes, shares, +1s or tweets your page. In other words, it asks people to “pay” with a Tweet, Like, Share or +1 if they want access to your content.
But why does it work?
While it is possible to get likes and shares through conventional methods, it is difficult because:
- Users are not motivated to like or share your content. 90% of technical and commercial websites currently don’t receive traffic from social networks!
- While social buttons are present on most websites, they are in visitor’s “blind spot”, much like ads are. People ignore them reflexively.
- Even when people like your content, they may forget to “like” or “share”your content. They may not be aware that it matters to you.
- If your content is valuable for your audience, why not ask them to support you directly? It’s not hard to “like” your content, right?
Beside Social Locker, I can also recommend Opt-in Panda by OnePress to gain more newsletter subscribers. Opt-in Panda is seamlessly integrated in Social Locker and works in a similar way hiding and unlocking content. Both plugins interact perfectly with the WordPress Theme Enfold I use both for this blog and miapple.me -Tech.Blog.
Stay tuned! 😉