Maximizing Reach: Auto Share from WordPress to Social Media

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

Links
- Blog2Social: https://wordpress.org/plugins/blog2social/
- Jetpack Social: https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack-social/
- Social Media Auto Publish: https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-media-auto-publish/
- SchedulePress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-scheduled-posts/
- Buffer: https://buffer.com/
- Zapier: https://zapier.com/

More from Bleech
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Transcript

Intro

Steffen 0:00

Hey Dominik .

Dominik 0:01

Hey , Steffen .

Steffen 0:02

How do you publish from WordPress to social media ?

Dominik 0:08

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

Publishing with WordPress Plugins

Dominik 0:31

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 1:20

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 .

Customization of Content

Steffen 2:02

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 .

Evolution of Direct Publishing

Dominik 3:05

Yeah , I also think this direct publishing from WordPress to social media is actually a bit outdated .

Dominik 3:12

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 3:25

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 3:40

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 .

Social Media Aggregators

Steffen 4:48

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 4:59

Yes .

Steffen 4:59

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 .