How to Auto Post Your Content to Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn

In this post, I’ll show you how to automatically send your new blog content to your most important social media profiles – Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn (auto post to social media that is) using only free services and no WordPress plugin.

I needed a way to update my Twitter feed, Facebook page, LinkedIn group, and Google+ page with each new post. For a while, I was using a WordPress plugin, but the free version wasn’t usable for Google+ and LinkedIn, so I was updating them manually. The solution wasn’t reliable and eventually, I stopped using that plugin altogether.

A couple days ago I was poking in my IFTTT and Buffer accounts and finally found what I was looking for. Let me explain.

IFTTT (If this then that)

It sounds like a pseudocode, but IFTTT is actually a unique online service. It connects dozens of services to each other. You need to create “recipes” that can be used to plug about 60 channels with each other, as of this writing.

For a long time, I was using it to monitor the news feeds from a couple of well-known blogs and automatically re-post new content to my Twitter account via Buffer. For some reason, there was often a problem with the featured image not being displayed in the tweet.

Buffer

Buffer, on the other hand, is a post scheduler that can be used to update your social media profiles. You can connect it to Twitter, Facebook (including Facebook pages), LinkedIn (including LinkedIn groups), Google+ pages, and App.net.

Buffer has one particular feature that we are going to use here, namely the secret email address for adding posts to your Buffer.

Tie them together, but with a twist

If you try to directly use Buffer in one of your IFTTT recipes, you’ll discover that you can only post to one Buffer channel. But I needed to post to all of them at once, not just one.

And thus I figured out what to do. There’s no need to use Buffer channel directly. Instead, I’m using Gmail.

And here is the complete setup

1. In Buffer Dashboard make sure all your social media profiles you want to be updated have a check mark next to them.
2. In IFTT, make sure your Gmail and Feed channels are turned on
3. Create a recipe.
4. For this choose Feed Channel and then News Feed option. Then enter your blog’s news feed URL.
5. Click on Create Trigger.
6. For that choose Gmail Channel and then Send an Email option. Now you need to fill in some of the fields as follows:
   • To: your Buffer secret email address
   • Subject: {{EntryTitle}}
   • Body: {{EntryUrl}}<br>@now (the @now signal tells Buffer to send updates immediately, instead of adding them to your Buffer queue)
7. Click on Create Action.
8. Give your recipe a description, and click the Create Recipe button.

That’s all! From now on, every time you publish a new post, your social media profiles will be updated.

And here’s an alternate method to auto post to social media

The previous section may fit your taste if you prefer to keep your WP installation at a minimum, but if you don’t mind installing JetPack for example, they have you covered, besides many other additions.

There are many other plugins out there allowing you to auto post to social media that may satisfy your needs, but for my part, I prefer to choose speed over functionality, if the latter can be achieved by implementing an external solution.

PS: By the way, updating your social media profiles with fresh content from your blog should have a positive impact from SEO perspective because this way you create strong and valuable backlinks to your posts. And in addition, everything is done automatically!

How about you? If you are aware of other methods to automatically share your content to social media, please share them with us in a comment below.