Apologies to anyone who follows me on LinkedIn, I don’t really think there’s many that do as I don’t contribute often but, I’ve been tinkering with pushing content from my site to social media platforms…
To be honest I thought this was wrapped up over a decade ago but wanted to refresh my site and move some of the chatter on my personal social feeds into a more focussed affair.
Read more: Social media integration/automationBlogging like it’s the noughties!
Yes, that’s kind of what’s been going on, although I hate the term blog. I really only have a website as I have the domain for my emails and, in my opinion, not having the a site attached is… well… just a bit lazy… Like so many sites out there I used WordPress.
What does a good share look like?
My ideal is a neat post that shows the article title, an except, any image it can pull and then a link to drive traffic to the site.
What about Publicize Jetpack Social?
For over 10 years Publicize was the simplest and cleanest way to push content from a self hosted WordPress site to key social media platforms but this year they made the move to restrict free usage to 30 shares a month. With that it doesn’t count the post but counts every platform it shares to; I want to push my content to LinkedIn and a Facebook page and, to be honest, 15 posts a month is probably ample for me but, Facebook have also deprecated the developer RSS to instant articles and, as I like to tinker and keep myself up to date, I’ve been looking at sharing options.
What about now??
Right, straight off I’m not suggesting that I’d done anything in the way of a thorough look but there are tons of paid and free options. I decided to try out IFTTT (If This Then That) and have looked at their WordPress to LinkedIn/Facebook applets but they were pretty flawed and was how the last posts were shared. The main issue I had with them was getting the posts it created to be only share an excerpt of the full articles, Facebook did a better job of handling the longer content but, crucially, it doesn’t honour/pick up on the read more block in the originating post.
I read up on tweaking the IFTTT ‘recipe’ to truncate the content but it was convoluted. With this post, as WordPress automatically creates an RSS feed, is to try working with the RSS feed which automatically shortens the content; let’s see if it passes muster…
Test update
Well, that was bobbins…. IFTTT pulled the whole content again from the RSS items something to come back to but for now I’ll stick to Jetpack Social
