Automating Social Media with WordPress

These days, the social media is the key to success. Making your site post on social sites is a great way to get good publicity. Manually handling this stuff is a tedious task; automating it could be the key to success. Being a popular platform, WordPress powers more than 70% of the online websites. Working with social media could be hectic if you do not know the intricacies of the platform. If you want to know how to automate your social media activities with WordPress, you are at the right place. That’s right, you won’t have to annoy your friends anymore asking them how-tos; you can focus on working on the content of the site while these social media activities are carried out on autopilot. The techniques you will find in this article will help you increase your followers by a huge number and establish your authority in the niche.

Background

Blogging is not an easy task. A blogger must research the topic and then construct the content with much care and diligence. Doing all that does not leave enough time for them to cater to all the social aspects of their blog. They simply cannot pay attention to it. So what if the blogger needs to expand his horizon, reach out to more people while delivering high quality content? For this purpose, they must employ social media to get their content to more people. Although WordPress maintains a very good directory, highlighting the freshly pressed stuff, it is not enough. You need to have a social presence on all the networks out there. Going from site to site, posting the same stuff over and over again could be a very tedious task (i.e. if you are active on a lot of networks). This is where automation comes in handy.

Social Media Automation

Automating the social activities is like a blessing in disguise for bloggers. At first it might seem like it could result in the loss of social relationships but it’s really not that bad. Let us have a look at some of the ways we can automate these activities.

The Built-In Functionality

This is the simplest and easiest to use. You can connect your WordPress to all the major social networks and have your content published over there. The best part is that you can have a Facebook page for your blog and then connect that page to your blog, which will help you keep your personal stuff separated from the posts you make.

Plug-ins

If you know WordPress, you must know that there are plug-ins for almost anything. There are many plug-ins available for social media automation. Let us check out some of them.

NextScripts Social Networks Auto Poster (SNAP)

While the basic WordPress functionality lets you connect to a limited number of social networks, this plug-in goes above and beyond that. I can certainly claim that you cannot name a single social network not supported by this plug-in. You just have to invest a little time configuring it; afterwards, it publishes the content to all the connected sites as soon as you hit the publish button. The best part is, you can customize the caption too.

Digg Digg

This plug-in is not about posting your fresh content to the social networks. What this plug-in does is that it allows the visitors to share the content through their own profiles. How cool is that? I mean people do not even have to go to your profile, they can just share the content themselves while going through your blog. The floating share bar is the main highlight of this plug-in i.e. a share bar stays on the visible post without interfering with your reading experience. A definite must-have for all the blogs fighting to be the best in their niche.

IFTTT

Once again, this plug-in helps you post the stuff to all the major social networks. They go beyond social networks. Here is a list of some of the supported channels:

– Facebook Profile, Fanpage.
– Twitter
– Google+
– Tumblr
– Evernote
– LinkedIn
– Delicious
– Blogger
– Diigo
– DropBox
– Google Drive
– Flickr
– OneDrive
– BitLy
– Hootsuite

The list is still growing, so you can imagine how good this is.

Mastering the art of handling the social media is a tough job, but it is not impossible. It is actually within your grasp. You have to tap into the mind of your audience and react accordingly. The plug-ins mentioned above are such that they facilitate you in the process. Make sure that you use them to their fullest to get the most out of your audience.