We’ve covered how to schedule WordPress posts in a previous tutorial, now we are going to focus on plugins to help you publicize your posts on social media networks. I’ve tested a number of plugins and reviewed my top 3 for you. This round-up of plugins is for both people who publish immediately and those who want to schedule their WordPress posts.
Social Networks Auto Poster
2014 Update: SNAP has done a lot of improvements and is now my preferred social media publishing tool.
Where Social fails at scheduled posts, Social Networks Auto Poster (SNAP) works. SNAP will also post to the social networks as you — none of that “shared by”. The downside is that SNAP does take some time to setup (excellent instructions though). The free versions of SNAP allows you to post to one account per social network.
SNAP has a very customizable posting interface which allows you to set your own standard layout for posts on each of the networks you post to. Here are some screen shots of how I’ve set up SNAP to post for facebook and twitter.
Jetpack
Jetpack has among other features, a social network broadcaster called Publicize. Jetpack is from Automattic, the folks who make WordPress, so we expect things to work smoothly. And they do, whether a post is published now or scheduled for later, it gets broadcast without a hitch in my testing.
But of course, there is a downside. You can only broadcast to one account on a given social network. So if you post to your facebook page then you can’t post to your personal facebook account as well. Also, Jetpack posts to some social media networks with the “shared via”. Here is how facebook and twitter broadcasts look.
TwitterFeed
TwitterFeed is a service that broadcasts your blog posts to the social networks you select. It’s not a plugin, so it will work with any blog platform that publishes an RSS feed. It works by checking your blog feed to see if there are any new updates, then publishing the updates to your social networks.
Since TwitterFeed is service, you don’t have to worry about compatibility with any of your installed plugins or forgetting to turn on a feature. It just works quietly in the background.
Now for the downside. Like Social and Jetpack, it only supports one account per social network. On facebook it displays rather minimally compared to the plugin options and it does include a “shared via”. Here’s how posts look on facebook and twitter. It also can take a few hours to notice that there has been update.
Conclusion
After testing out these (and a number of other plugins that I didn’t like), I use SNAP. If you are interested in general social media scheduling, check out my article on it.
I’m giving SNAP a try now. So far so good! Thanks!
I had no problem broadcasting scheduled posts with Social. Unfortunately, however, it seems to not be working lately at all. I’m afraid that MailChimp has stopped supporting on their end with a key domain server that handles the API stuff for Twitter and Facebook (socialize-this.com). I’ve fired off emails to both MailChimp and CrowdFavorite to see if either plans to continue support.
Carl, if you don’t hear back from them or don’t like their response you should look into the SNAP plugin I mentioned above. It has been working very well for me. The setup is a little longer, but it’s regularly updated and maintained.