Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 5 years you know that social media has radically changed the face of the internet in a very short time span. The big brands have already reaped, and are continuing to reap, the benefits of using social media. However the black art of social media marketing (SMM) is still pretty new and in its infancy. And if you add some social media marketing to your markting mix, you will certainly be ahead of the curve and your competitors.
Search engines, and we’re really just talking Google and Bing here, index publicly shared stories and articles from ALL social media. It’s now official from the likes of Matt Cutts that a solid social presence is one of the big up and coming ranking factors for SEO. You will nowadys notice that Google includes social signs like authorship, +1’s, circles (from their own social media…) directly on its search result pages (SRP’s). Therefore, if implemented correctly, you can use social media to drive more traffic to your site whenever you want it.
Auto Post to Facebook
The aim here is to automatically publish links/posts on your Facebook Page directly from your WordPress website or blog with no further input from you. Kinda auto-posting so to speak.
It used to be a as simple as copy-paste the RSS feed from your WordPress site into the Notes section of your Facebook “Fan Page” (as it was known then). However his has now been discontinued for some time.So this should be easy right? Well in the ever changing online world, what used to be a alk in the park, has been complicated by the complexities of security…
So now we are all working with the Facebook graph-API in different ways. Anyway you do it you need to create a Facebook application. (Don’t panic, it’s pretty easy if you follow the tutorials though!) You will need to be logged in to your personal Facebook to work around it all though.
Here’s a couple of options for you.
Plugins available
UPDATE NEW OFFICIAL FACEBOOK
PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS….
There are a couple that still claim to work…
“Facebook Page Publish”
“Facebook Page Publish” publishes your blog posts directly to the wall of your Facebook business page. Posts appear on the wall like you were sharing a link. There is also no “published via Application” notification so it does look like it’s been added directly by a ‘real person and not spoon-fed.
The authors gravatar, a self-choosen or random post image, the title, author, categories and a short excerpt of your post can be shown which adds further to the ‘real’ feel.
it has a scheduler built in so you can decide yourself when and what posts to the page. Supports local and remote publishing based criteria e.g. on the post category.
Makes use of the modern Facebook graph-API (ooooooooh, scary!) and actually integrates easily into your WordPress Blog.
“SharePress”
SharePress is another option for a WordPress plugin that helps you talk with your tribes on Facebook (and indeed Twitter) by automatically publishing your WordPress posts the moment you post them on your WordPress site.
With this FREE version of SharePress you’ll be able to
- Automatically publish your WordPress posts to your personal Facebook wall
- Publish while you sleep: your post is automatically published when it goes live
Upgrade to the PRO version and you’ll be able to
- Publish to any/all of the Facebook pages you manage
- Publish to your Twitter followers
- Customize each Facebook status message
- Control the image Facebook uses just by setting the post’s featured image
- Customize Twitter status hashtag
- Delay SharePress’ sharing for minutes, hours, or days after a post goes live
- Schedule reposts of your content: keep traffic flowing to your site day and night
- Get e-mail based support directly from the developer, often on the same day
Single-site licensing, and unlimited Developer licensing are available. SharePress is compatible with WordPress MU and WordPress Multi-Network.
Want to read what the customers have said about SharePress? Check this out.
