Save Yourself Time: Auto Post to Social Media from WordPress
If your blog is set up to auto post to social media from WordPress, it saves you from having to take the extra step of logging into Facebook (or Google+, or Twitter, etc.) and posting the link yourself. I know how busy small business owners can be, so any time savings, no matter how small, is significant.
There are tons of different ways to get your WordPress website to automatically post to your social media accounts, but I think that JetPack* is the most comprehensive and easiest plugin for non-techie people to use.
The module of JetPack that is used to publish your blog posts to Facebook and other social media platforms is called Publicize. You can activate it by going into your JetPack settings, scrolling down to where it says “Publicize”, and clicking on “Activate”.
This will change the link that was “Activate” to two other links, “Configure” and “Deactivate”.
If you click on “Configure”, you will come to the page where you can connect your social media platforms. Just click on “Connect” next to the applicable social media account and add in your login information.
You can see here that I already have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ connected on my website.
Once you have activated Publicize and connected it to your Facebook (or other social media) account, a new “Publicize” box will appear above the “Publish” button you see when you are writing a blog post.
If you click on “Edit Details” under the list of connected social media platforms, you can pick and choose which platforms this particular message will be sent to, and you can enter a custom message. This is a great place to give a short description of your blog post and use any applicable hashtags. Since I have my account set to publish to Twitter, as well as other accounts, I make sure that my message is Tweet length (140 characters or less) so that it will still look good there as well.
And now you’re all set! As soon as you’re ready to publish your post, click “Publish” and your blog post, with a link and your custom message, will be sent to all of your social media platforms!
*If you look around for reviews of JetPack, you’ll find mixed opinions. A lot of people don’t like it because they say it’s too big and bloated. As far as I’m concerned, as long as you only activate the modules you’re actually going to use, it’s a very useful plugin.