Auto Post Content From WordPress in Facebook, Twitter and Other Social Media

If you want to get more traffic to your website and grow your brand, it is essential to promote your content on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The process to promote the content of your website, although not very complicated, can be quite time consuming if you do it manually, as it involves a few steps (some optional):

1. Post the new content on your WordPress website,
2. Copy the URL of this new post,
3. Go to a link shortener (e.g. bitly or cuttly) and paste the URL,
4. Copy the short version of the URL,
5. Go to your social network profile,
6. Write the message describing your post,
7. Add the short URL,
8. Make sure the image has been uploaded or select and upload one manually,
9. Add hashtags,
10. Search the accounts of the people you want to mention,
11. Add the mentions,
12. Post the social message,

Repeat steps 5-12 for each of your social media accounts where you want to post a message to. But that’s not all, add the following steps:

13. Analyze which posts are having the most success (have the most views and are shared the most),
14. Select one of them and go through steps 2-12 to reshare it a second time.

Repeat these last two points as many times as possible… As you can see, if you publish regularly on your blog and want to promote it in more than one account (personal and business, for example) in each social network, this whole process can take a lot of time that you would surely love to be able to use for another task.

Luckily, we have several tools that allow us to automate these steps in different ways and promote our WordPress content on our social networks, saving us a lot of time.

Should We Automate Everything?

But before you rush into planning your vacation with so much automation, I’d like to discuss a few points to keep in mind:

• The tools to automate social media promotion are useful for both small bloggers and large companies that manage a lot of social media accounts. Whatever your case, consider the option of automating the promotion of your content on social networks.
• It is very important to keep the balance between automation and personal interaction with your followers or customers. Determine clearly when to automate and when to interact.
• Posting and promoting content, especially content that is not time-sensitive, can be highly automated.
• Make sure your content posting schedule is flexible and stay up-to-date with current news. You may want to pause, modify, or even briefly stop the automated flow in response to news or events.
• Make sure that your automated social media promotion does not look like a bot and includes varied messages and properly formatted messages for each network (including hashtags, emojis, etc).
• Never automate the interaction with your readers. Do not automate responses to comments on your blog, or contact them in an automated way. Customers and readers realize they are dealing with a bot instead of a person:

• Set aside time periodically to monitor all the activity occurring on social media.

In short, automating the promotion of your blog content on social networks will save you a lot of time. Use part of this time to take better care of personalized relationships with your readers and customers.

How to Automate Facebook and Twitter Promotion From WordPress (10 Alternatives)

Next, let’s look at the different alternatives for automating the promotion of your posts on Facebook and Twitter using a plugin.

Some of the simplest alternatives that I mention can be done with a totally free plugin or with its free version (such as Social Media Auto Publish, Revive Old Posts, Blog2Social, or Nelio Content, among others). And for more complex automations you will need a premium plugin (such as Nelio Content, FS Poster, Social Auto Poster, or CoSchedule, among others).

In all of them, after installing and activating the plugin, the first thing you need to do to automate the publication of messages on your social networks is to connect your profiles in your WordPress.

Step 0: Connect Your Social Profiles With Your WordPress

Let’s see, for example, with the Nelio Content plugin how to connect our @NelioSoftware Facebook and @NelioSoft Twitter accounts.

For this, the Nelio Content plugin includes the Nelio Content – Settings page and in the Social Profiles tab you can add your Facebook and Twitter profiles, as well as LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google My Business, Reddit, and Tumblr.

Click on the icon of the network you want to connect and add the information requested in each of them, you will see that with a couple of clicks, you will already have your profiles connected.

In the case of Facebook, keep in mind that Facebook no longer allows third-party applications to post to personal profiles. So if you still want to post to your personal profile, Facebook recommends that you convert your personal profile to a page profile.

Let’s see below in what ways we can automate the publication of our messages on Facebook and Twitter. The examples I will show you are made with Nelio Content, but some of the features discussed can also be found in some of the plugins mentioned above.

Nelio Content

I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.

Panozk

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#1 Post a Message at the Time of Publication of a Post With the Metadata of the Post

When you write a post on your blog, you must not forget to enter its SEO snippet: the title and description that you want any search engine to display on its results page. This information will probably be written at the time you write the post, by filling in this data in the SEO plugin that you have installed.

Well, the easiest alternative to automate the promotion of your posts is to publish, after the post is published, a message on your social profile with the same post title, its featured image and the meta description that you have included in the SEO plugin that you have installed in your WordPress.

So, for example, this is what you see after filling in the following SEO metadata from the post about the interview I did with Justing Tadlock some time ago:

Forget about the first ten steps mentioned at the beginning of this post. With Nelio Content, you have a button that will automatically generate these social messages that will promote your post in the profiles that you have previously connected.

After clicking the Customize Timeline button, a social message on Facebook and another on Twitter (and on any other profile that you have added from other social networks) will be automatically scheduled to be published right after the publication of the post on your blog..

And after the publication of our post, we see that the following tweet will have been published on our Twitter account.

#2 Customize the Message to Be Posted on Each Social Network

As I mentioned earlier, if you want to increase the interaction with your Facebook and Twitter followers, the more personal your posts are, the better. Don’t limit all the information posted on social networks to just SEO metadata. With very little extra effort, these tools allow you to personalize the messages to be published.

In this case, of the 12 steps described at the beginning, you just have to make the effort to write the social message that describes your post (and, if you want, to add mentions or hashtags).

Thus, for example, with the Nelio Content plugin, you can edit the previously created message and add the custom text of your choice.

In this way, your Facebook followers will see fully personalized messages promoting your posts.

#3 Customize the Message to Be Post With the Content of Your Post

The content of our posts is ideal for sharing on our social networks, so why don’t you use it in your social messages directly? If you’ve already made the effort to write the content of a post, you don’t need to waste time thinking about which tweets will help you promote that post.

With a plugin like Nelio Content you can select the text fragment to share and easily create the message.

All you have to do is select your social network account and the time you want to share it. In this way you will have scheduled a new social message that will be published automatically when and where you have indicated.

#4 Include Mentions Automatically

As you may already know, mentions (adding the name of other users preceded by the @ character) are a very good way to notify other users of the publication of our tweets and a very good opportunity for them to reply or retweet us. This way you get to expand the conversation related to your original tweet.

And it is particularly interesting, when you write any post, to take the opportunity to mention on Twitter all those that you have mentioned through a reference in your post. But the process of searching for the author of each article you refer and their Twitter account can be quite time-consuming.

Luckily, you can reduce this time considerably with some of the plugins mentioned above. For example, with Nelio Content, as I mentioned in the previous point, if you select a phrase in your post that contains a link to another article, it automatically searches for the Twitter account of the author of the article and includes the mention of the author in the message preceded with /cc.

Of course, you can modify that tweet as you wish, but the work of looking for the author’s Twitter account is already done for you by the plugin.

#5 Plan Multiple Messages on Twitter to Promote a Single Post

As you well know, tweets have a very limited lifespan and, for this reason, it is a good idea to schedule the publication of multiple tweets for each post you publish. You will find this option in the premium plugins mentioned at the beginning of the article or also in some external tools specialized in this functionality such as Hootsuite or Buffer.

The best time to schedule for all your tweets is when you finish writing a post. How many messages should you schedule for each post? There is no single consensus and our recommendation is to experiment. We schedule around 10-15 social messages for each post, distributed between the same day of publication, the next day, during the week, and during the following month.

#6 Automatically Generate Multiple Social Messages

It’s all very well to plan all the messages at the moment you have just written a post, but it is still much more efficient if the plugin you use is able to generate, not only a message on Facebook and another on Twitter at the time of publication of the post as we have seen above, but all the tweets that are going to promote that post over a period of time.

Clearly, this functionality is the one that will save you the most time in promoting your content. For example, with the premium version of Nelio Content, when clicking on the Customize Timeline button shown in the image of the first point, not only the automatic messages that will be published at the time of publication of the post are generated, but also all those messages that will promote that post.

And, of course, you can edit and modify any of the automatically created messages to customize them.

#7 Create Templates for Automatic Message Posting

Let’s continue with the customization of messages. We’ve seen above that you can re-share phrases from your own post. Another alternative is to have message templates that will help the automatic message generation process to create more personalized messages.

Depending on the plugin you use, you can define templates per social profile and per post author, as well as adding hashtags and mentions to other social profiles.

So, for example, with the Nelio Content plugin, on Nelio’s Twitter profile you will find a tweet generated automatically from one of our templates in which “New blog post” has been added in from of the title of the post and the title is enclosed in quotation marks.

This is another way to make the content you post automatically look more original.

#8 Indicate Which Phrases to Share Automatically

We can go even further with the “personalization” of automated messages. If I mentioned earlier that selecting phrases from your post can be an original way to share it on your social networks, why not include these phrases directly in the automatic generation of messages?

In the case of Nelio Content, when reviewing your post, you can mark all the phrases that can be automatically shared on your social networks.

Once the text has been marked, the automatic generation of messages to publish on Facebook and Twitter will not only take into account the templates that you have created, but will also include messages with marked phrases extracted from the text.

#9 Re-promote the Most Successful Posts in an Efficient Way

Your content should not be forgotten shortly after publishing it. Especially for those posts that are having a greater impact, it is worthwhile to reshare them and keep driving traffic to your blog.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to go to Google Analytics, analyze the posts that have been most visited or most shared and then go to social networks to create messages to re-promote them. Make sure that the plugin you install helps you by doing this work for you.

With Nelio Content you can see the posts that are having the most success (more visits and more participation) in the period you have selected. Then, with a simple click you can create social messages to re-promote that post.

#10 Automate the Promotion of Your Most Successful Old Posts

Finally, if you have almost no time to look at which posts are having the most success and you want to maximize efficiency in promoting your posts, having a tool that will do it for you is a delight.

Nelio Content‘s automations analyze which posts are the most successful and takes care of scheduling tweets on your Twitter accounts so that they’re always full of interesting content from your blog. In addition, you can create custom templates for the publication of old posts, different from the templates you define for the promotion of a post you just published. This way, the posts looks even much more personalized.

Conclusion

As you can see, by using a plugin, promoting your posts on Facebook, Twitter or any other social network is much more efficient than if you wanted to perform this task manually. Even so, remember that automation must go hand in hand with customization. Make sure that the tool you use has an editorial calendar where you can move the date of publication of any post and that its promotion is automatically consistent with the new date.

Featured image of Tim Bennett on Unsplash.