A common question that clients ask me is about how to automatically update their Facebook page, Twitter account or other social profiles, when they publish a new blog post.
There are many ways to do this – here are a couple of my preferred methods. Although there are some WordPress plugins available for these types of tasks, generally speaking I don’t use them. Sometimes they are tricky to configure, or perhaps just not that reliable. Plus, why add unnnecessary plugins when you can acheive the same thing just as well, if not better, another way?
These services are RSS-based, so you will need to know your RSS feed address. If you are using WordPress and have not configured Feedburner, your feed address is generally:
yourdomain.com/feed
If you have configured Feedburner, you will find the link to your feed in your Feedburner account. If it has been set up correctly on your site, you can of course just click your own RSS/Subscribe link and grab the url from the address bar.
DLVR.IT
Dlvr.it is a really efficient service that lets you set up automated posting quickly and easily. It’s a free service and you can use it to update your Facebook profile, Facebook Page, Twitter account, LinkedIn and others.
If you choose them, it has some pretty sophisiticated options you can configure, such as the number of times to post per hour, how oftern to check the feed, what format to post the story on Facebook etc. So you get a lot of flexibility and it’s been very reliable. Usually any hiccups in things not getting posted are due to the destination site being down – such as when Twitter’s servers are overloaded.
Dlvr.it has its own url shortener and will provide you stats on your feeds clicks etc, but if you prefer Bitly (or some other service) you can configure your account to use that. You can set up multiple feeds and destinations with dlvr.it so if you have multiple websites you can do your automation for all of them in this one central place.
IFTTT.com
IFTTT is a more complex service that can do some very cool things beyond just posting your blogs to Twitter and Facebook. They currently support about 50 different social media channels and you create actions, or “recipes” with the following formula:
“If this…..then….that”
So for example: “If I a publish a new blog post, then post it to Twitter”
Given the wide variety of supported services you can create some interesting combos and you’ll find plenty of recipes from other users that you can copy ( “Email me new photos from Mars Curiosity rover” ) was one that caught my eye. Their interface is very simple and easy to use, so it’s quick to get up and running.
Do you have a preferred method for automating the posting of your blogs to social networks? Share in the comments!
Header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gjulian/4804578725/in/set-72157624528127154/