Sending your WordPress blog posts to social media

I was having a 1-1 this morning with Tanya from Emperor Coaching. It was lovely to meet Tanya and find out a bit about her and what she does.

Whilst we were chatting she told me that she creates her blog posts on LinkedIn, but would like to know whether it is possible to create blog posts on her website, and publish them to LinkedIn as well, without the need for lots of tedious cut and paste.

Challenge accepted!

I did a bit of hunting around and came across two plugins

Blog2Social

and

Social Networks Auto-Poster

I decided to give Blog2Social a try. As I always do before I try a new plugin, I had a hunt around to see opinions. I found an interesting blog post that gives more details on the difference between the two plugins, and what you get in the free and paid for version.

I’m going to try out the free version to see if it can do the basics.

Having installed the plugin, I checked to see that the plugin recieves updates – it does, and that it has a good number of installs and positive reviews.

Getting it set up

Having installed and activated the plugin, a new menu appeared on my dashboard. I clicked on settings, and the first thing I had to do was set the time zone to the UK.

I then looked at the Social Media Networks tab, as I correctly guessed this was where to copnnect to my networks.

Click on the big blue button

And you get to a page with all the social media networks ready to connect.

Connecting to LinkedIn and Facebook

I decided to start with LinkedIn and Facebook.

LinkedIn was fairly simple, just requiring me tlcikt eh +profile button and the to log into LinkedIn.

For facebook, I selected +page. Do take the time to choose the permissions you give blog2social, and switch off anything it doesnt need, which is everything except posting to your page.

So how to make it actually do something

Having installed and activated the plugin, the only thing to do was to write a blog post and try it out.

Auto-scheduling, where postiung a blog post automatically posts it to social media is a paid for option, so I created and published this post, then visited the Blog2Social menu on my dashboard . There I found an option for

Site & Blog Content

I used the drop down menus to get a list of blog posts only.

I clicked on the blue Share on Social Media button, and two posts, one for linkedin and one for Facebook were generated for me to publish.

I had some options to tweak the text and change titles and descriptions until I wa happy.

Clicking the green share button, and off it went.

Did it work?

Well not quite the way I had hoped. Certainly a post was created with the image, the basic description and the website blogpost url.

I had hoped it would actually create a linkedIn article . I could have added in the full text, as that is an option at the point of sharing, but all formatting would have gone.

Summary

This is a good way to get your blog posts shared onto other platforms, and there is a lot to be said for sending people to your website to read your posts, but sadly it didn’t do what I had hoped which was to create an actual LinkedIn article