On the fence about auto-sharing your WordPress posts on social media? Learn about our experiences, strategies and tools to bridge the gap.
Highlights 00:00 Intro 00:31 Publishing with WordPress Plugins 02:02 Customization of Content 03:05 Evolution of Direct Publishing 04:48 Social Media Aggregators
How do you publish from WordPress to social media?
Dominik:
Yeah, that's the second question, right that we can ask, and again, there are different ways to do that. I guess, like, you first have to tell me, like, what kind of social network do you want to publish to? Right? So, because usually it's really dependent on the social media network. It is not if you use like an aggregator and there are several of these out there as well, like different services, but usually you need a plug-in for WordPress that will connect to the specific social network and in the social network, you have to create, usually like an OAuth app, that's what it's called so you need to authenticate yourself on this platform as like the WordPress user that you want to publish for. So you go into WordPress, the WP Admin, and then you click authenticate and then you will be taken to the social media network, say, okay, I allow this website to access my data via an API, and then you will have like your credentials stored in WordPress and every time that you publish a post and you can usually select what kind of post types you want that to be then these will be published as like a social media post.
Dominik:
And, of course, there are like a lot of differences between these social networks, because in Twitter you cannot post that many characters. In other social networks you only post video and others only. You only post text and others you only post images and so on. Sometimes this can be automated where you say, like there is a mapping inside of the plug-in where you say, okay, this featured image is always like the post image and then the text you will just copy as text. But sometimes you will also, in the publishing workflow inside of WordPress, you will have to make the adjustments to say what should be the content of the social media post that you want to have.
Steffen:
Yeah, and I actually really prefer that, because when you want to fully optimize it so that it would only post that new blog post or news to social media with the given title and the description, I think this is rather uncommon and this doesn't look very exciting to people, right? But for social networks, you want to have some custom text, some custom description to talk about your post, right? Unless it really just is a hey, I want to make sure it's out there, and we sometimes did that, I think, for rather for something like posting something to a Twitter profile where you post a lot of other stuff, but for especially something like LinkedIn or Facebook. I think it's very common that you should have a customized description and title that you prepare and then maybe schedule it so that it automatically just gets posted when the article is getting published.
Dominik:
Yeah, I also think this direct publishing from WordPress to social media is actually a bit outdated.
Dominik:
So people did that a lot at the beginning of Facebook or when companies started to use Facebook, when companies started to use Twitter, because they thought that, yeah, I want my content to be online there as well.
Dominik:
But nowadays it has to be integrated into the communication strategy, into the marketing strategy of the company, and a lot of the times it doesn't make sense to just publish the content also on a social network.
Dominik:
But you rather and we're probably getting into this in some later episodes you rather want to share the article on your homepage, like on your website, on the social networks, and not only the content but really the link, and then maybe, like, add some text, some personal text to it that can be customized, and this I mean you can do on the platform itself or again, use like some social media aggregator, right, but I think it's every social network has like its own rules and its own type of community, and usually you will not be successful nowadays if you just post the stuff that you have on your website also on the social media networks. But you need some additional like value for the people, right, if it's like the expert that just says, hey people, here's a new article from our website, usually like, maybe on Twitter you tweet a lot about these topics as well, anyways, and then you can just point there and maybe you'll get some, some more traffic on the site. So it's always like has to be seen in the whole, like in the total picture.
Steffen:
Yeah, so there are these social media aggregators. You call them. Do you mean things like like buffercom, like where you can schedule posts to post to multiple networks?
Dominik:
Yes.
Steffen:
Yeah right, I really like these. Then also, you could still optimize it in a different way with tools like Zapier, which are just like tools to connect certain APIs and create web automations and so on. That's also possible and I'd suggest let's add a couple of links to plugins to do automatic publishing of social media. But general, our recommendation is rather against it and to at least like take the time to really prepare your content specifically for each social network. Thanks.