Whenever you write a new post on your blog or website, its important to let your fans and followers know that you’ve shared an update to drive traffic to your post. You could individually update your social media accounts every time, but thankfully there are WordPress plugins that will automatically post to your social media networks after you write a post to save you time. We recommend using the NextScripts: Social Media Auto Posters plugin.
This plugin connects to many social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, LiveJournal, Flipboard, DreamWidth, Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Plurk, VKontakte(VK.com), YouTube, App.net, Scoop.It and more.
This plugin allows you to create custom social media messages to go along with your blog post. This helps your messages look and feel more authentic and increase the chances of your posts being interacted with and shared socially.
How to Use NextScripts: Social Networks Auto Poster on Your Site
As the NextScripts: Social Networks Auto Poster plugin is free to use, it can be installed on your site directly from the WordPress plugin directory.
To do so, log into your site’s admin area (http://yoursite.com/wp-admin) and then navigate to Plugins > Add New using the sidebar menu.
From the Add Plugins screen, enter ‘NextScripts’ in the search field and install this plugin:
To set up the plugin, navigate to Settings> Social Networks Autoposter.
From here, select “Add new account.” For some networks you can simply enter your details while others are more complex.
Depending on which social networks you plan to use, you may need to carry out some additional steps to integrate the account with your website. While these are relatively straightforward, the developers have created easy to follow online documentation for each social network.
Once you’ve added the account details for each social network you want to auto-post your new blog content to, you can configure how the plugin will work on your site. You can do this through the Settings tab on the plugin. The plugin has a ton of functionalities that make it stand out from other similar plugins.
It allows you to choose which tags and categories to include or exclude content from in the auto-posting schedule, whether you want to auto-repost already published content, and when to auto-post your content.
It plugin also has the ability to grab any replies or comments that are posted on the social media networks in response to your post, and then import them into your WordPress site and publish them as post comments.
This could be a great way to generate discussion on your website and collate all the comments from the different social networks in one place for easy reference. You can also set the plugin to auto-generate hashtags to be used in your social media posts, based on the tags that you have applied to your content. Again this is another way to increase the reach of your social media posts.
What else can the Social Media Auto Posters Plugin do?
Through the plugin settings you can also choose to repost previously published content at regular intervals, helping to generate more interest in content that might otherwise remain forgotten.
You can also use this plugin to send out a broadcast message to be published on all the social media networks you’ve connected to your website. This broadcast message is independent from any specific posts on your website and could be used to make an announcement, such as the launch of a new design or product, or new feature that has been made available.