Having seen many people go back and forth using multiple social media accounts even multiple account from the same source even though they had one tool that could do it all was the reason I decided to write this quick guide for people with WordPress sites.

Top three reason to use your wordpress site as your Social Media Distribution system rather than the competitions.

1. If you have a WordPress site or some other CMS like it then you should take this as a rock, not a grain of salt.

2. If you’re using social media for your company like twitter, Facebook etc… You should listen, it wont take long.

3. If you’re tired of using multiple Social media accounts or paying someone to do so in order to promote a product or event. You can still do this but now all in one place.

Let’s start.

Using WordPress and a few simple but powerful tools can get this all done in a flash.

First and foremost I suggest that you start all of your content from your home (your website) and then tree out to the social media sites. Why give them the all your hits and probably never see them kick back any in return.

Some tools I use for our wordpress sites are. RSS Graffiti, WP to Twitter and Twitter Feed. Are simple to setup and you’ll never need to touch anything except for wordpress for a while. Especially if all your doing is saying things like. How was your weekend, come see this, come on in and check this out etc… And last but not least is Shareaholic an easy to install plugin for WordPress.

All wordpress RSS is handled in a simple way. To find your feed you may need to look at the wordpress feeds page : http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds and figure out what format you may be using depending on if you use permalinks or not it could be as simple as just adding /feed/ to the end of a WordPress category URL…. That’s how we roll.

First off find your feed. Example: http://c1n.tv/feed/

Chrome reads feeds fairly standard so if you’re interested in the appearance I suggest FF IE, Safari. On a sidenote: Wow Google have you not even checked or I guess they make you use a reader?

RSS Graffiti: http://www.rssgraffiti.com/  / https://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/

A little slow but works beautifully, Simple to register and feed your post category to Facebook. Enough said. Search for RSS Graffiti on Facebook and they walk you through the steps to get a feed setup for a Facebook page you made or at least have admin access too.

WP to Twitter: http://www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/

Probably the most time consuming to setup but by far the best one I’ve found for twitter. This one lets you not only send your new posts to twitter but also resend a post to twitter without having to republish one and duplicate content just by clicking update (Just beware if you don’t want things going to twitter if you update a lot.). As well it provides you with a way to push content to a Hash-tag ! Sweet! Login to twitter and select API down there at the bottom and/or visit https://dev.twitter.com/ to get started. The plugin designer also wrote a nice walk-through on how to do this as well. But you’ll need to creat a new Application, call it what you will, put your URL in (Not yoru feed) and make sure you have it set to read and write access level. That should get you all the keys and tokens you need to copy into the WP to twitter settings. Once setup it works great. Believe me.

Twitter Feed: http://twitterfeed.com/

Simple to register and feed to twitter. Can also be used for more than one account and not just for twitter, however I only use it for secondary accounts, for example. You have a category that you want to feed to a separate twitter account, this is made possible by twitter feed. It’s not instant like WP to twitter but like RSS graffiti it sends a category feed to an account you define. Great if you have multiple twitter accounts and directly relate to categories you have made in wordpress, like News, Movies, Music etc… Not as pretty, but then again are tweets pretty? lol. I don’t think they allow that yet.

Shareaholic: http://www.shareaholic.com/

Simple to install plugin for sharing posts, pages etc… I usually use this after I have sent things out to Facebook and twitter. This pretty much encapsulates the rest of places you can socialize your post with in one simple click. The key to sharing using shareaholic I think would be that whatever you are sharing is share with whoever you’re logged in as. To make sure your sharing as the right person just make sure you’re logged in as them or else it will share from your personal account.

Hope these applications give you a little insight into what you should be using for social media rather than spending your time on 3 or 4, why not just press a button and feed the family all in one, on top of that you’ll be sending people to your website rather than keeping them outside and so easily moved to something else in 5 seconds or less. Let’s hope that’s not the case. Feel free to comment, if it’s related I’ll approve it.

Thanks!

Aaron Smith

webmaster@boulderchannel1.com