In today’s digital world, social media is undoubtedly the most effective ways of promoting any online content. Social media users spend hours every day scrolling through content and sharing anything they find relevant and interesting. Therefore, publishing your WordPress website’s posts in social networks can help to reach your target audience. Thus driving more traffic to your website and most importantly increase your brand visibility. However, sharing your posts on all the social networking sites that engage your audience can be tedious and time-consuming.
SMAP Plugin Features
Luckily, you can use a free WordPress plugins to automate this process. One of the best plugins for this task is the Social Media Auto Publish (SMAP). In this guide, you will learn how to auto share your blog content to various social media channels including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
In summary, this WordPress plugin helps you to:
- Publish messages and images on your Facebook Pages / profile.
- Share your content on Facebook by attaching the posts or sharing its link.
- Publish to Twitter / LinkedIn with an image.
- Determine which posts to share on social networks by filtering based on posts categories or custom types.
- Customize the social media messages for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
- You can also disable publishing on a particular social channel as well as disable / enable page publishing.
Currently, the SMAP free version supports three social networks, but you can upgrade to the Pro version which supports more channels and provides extra functionality.
1. Install Social Media Auto Publish Plugin
Log in to your WordPress website, from the dashboard left side menu, go to “Plugins” section. Click on “Add New” option to open the plugins page. Here you can search for the plugin “social media auto publish“ . From the result click the “Install Now” button and install the plugin from the free WordPress repository.
After installation, click the activate button. This will add a new item, “Social Media Auto Publish” to your dashboard sidebar menu. Learn more on how to install and activate the plugins on WordPress site.
2. Configure SMAP Settings
First, you need to configure the app for various social network sites. Hover your mouse over the new menu item on the sidebar and select “Settings” to start configuring.
Switch to the “General” tab and enable / disable publishing posts or pages to social media under the “Basic Settings”. If disabled, click “Yes” to allow publishing.
- Under “Advanced Settings” you can filter the posts you want to publish based on categories and custom post types.
- Scroll down to the “Other Settings” section and toggle to your preference.
- Once done, click the green “UPDATE SETTINGS” button at the bottom of the general settings page.
2.1. Configure Facebook Settings
This allows you to specify the settings for publishing on Facebook.
- Go to the “Facebook Settings” tab. If you don’t have a Facebook app to link to your site, you can follow the instructions to create one.
- The first section is for the Facebook application details. Enter the details for your app such as the application name, Id and secret key.
Select a posting method from the options and then pick your preferred message format by clicking a field from the option. You can preview the message fields displayed in the box below the format list and click the “Save” button to apply the settings.
2.2. Configure Twitter Settings
In order to auto share your posts on Twitter, simply click “Yes” to turn on the enable publishing feature for Twitter. You need to fill up the required Tweeter API details.
- For the message format, click to add a field of the post such as the title of the post, permalink and so on.
- Specify whether you want to include an image to the post and click “Save” to apply the changes.
2.3. Configure LinkedIn Settings
For LinkedIn, you need to provide the “Client ID” and “Client Secret” to link the plugin with your LinkedIn application.
- Choose the message format and specify the profile sharing option. You can choose to share the post with the public or your connections.
- The SMAP plug also allows you to select the pages for auto sharing and then click “Save”.
Once you complete the setup for the various social media sites and the general social media publishing settings, your posts will be published to your social networks automatically. SMAP plugin will publish the posts based on your message filter settings.
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3. Jetpack Publicize Module
If you are hesitating to create Facebook app and worrying about privacy you can use Jetpack Publicize module. This will help you to share the post on six social platforms and you can customize the options before publishing the article.
Jetpack will add a metabox on WordPress post editor like below. You can modify the message and choose the platform to share before publishing. The big advantage here is that you don’t need to create Facebook app or use Twitter API for this.
4. Manually Publishing on FaceBook and Twitter
Auto sharing is useful only for certain type of activities like launching new event or new product. It does not make sense to auto share each and every post on your social network profiles.
Also you need Facebook app and Twitter API details for auto publishing your posts. This may be a complicated task for many of the normal users. In our experience, the best way is to manually share the posts on one social profile like Twitter. You can authorize Twitter account to connect with your Facebook account. This will auto share whatever content you tweet on your Facebook personal or page’s profile. In this manner, you can share only selected articles on one platform and automatically share the same on other platform.
Conclusion
Publishing your blog content to social media sites is a great way of reaching your loyal, potential and general audience. However, posting every of your newly created content on different social media platforms can be a lot of work, especially when you create multiple posts on a daily basis. You may not even have the time to do this. Fortunately, if you are a WordPress site owner you can use the free Social Media Auto Publisher or Jetpack plugin to automatically share your content with your target audience. These plugins also allow you to customize the way of displaying the social media messages.
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