One of the best ways to draw attention to your blog posts is by publishing them on social networks. Not only the post you just published, also the older but still relevant ones.
There are several tools to help you post to your social networks. A lot of online tools, and some plugins. The tool I will show you, is the Social Network AutoPoster (SNAP), built by NextScripts. I use SNAP PRO and the SNAP Premium API on World of WordPress.
Why autopost?
Although it isn’t difficult to publish your blog posts on social media, it can be a lot of work. Especially when you write a lot and want to publish all your posts to a lot of social networks. This is where SNAP gets in.
With SNAP you can fully automate the process of publishing your blog posts to many social networks. It can immediately publish your new blog post, publish it at a specific moment and repost your older post at the same time. Set up the plugin once, and forget about publishing to social networks by hand!
Publish to most major social networks
SNAP offers a PRO plugin, that lets you publish to unlimited accounts of social networks that have their own native API. SNAP Premium API gives the plugin the ability to publish to networks that don’t have their own native API.
These features make it possible to publish to these (both free and paid) social networks: 500Px, Blogger, deviantART, Diigo, Facebook, Flickr, Flipboard, Google My Business, Google+, Instagram, Instapaper, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Line, MailChimp, Medium, ok.ru, Plurk, Pinterest, Reddit, Scoop.It, SETT, Telegram, Tumblr, Twitter, vBulletin, VK.Com, weibo, WP Based Blog, XING, Yo, YouTube.
Installing the plugin
To be able to use SNAP Pro and Premium API, you need to install the free version from WordPress.org. After that, you purchase both the Pro version and the Premium API. From your NextScripts account, you can download the “NextScripts: SNAP Pro Upgrade Helper”. After installing and activating it on your website, you have to enter your activation key.
Now you are good to go!
Add accounts
You start by adding accounts of social networks you like to publish posts to. With the PRO version you can also add multiple accounts of the same network. In this example you can see how a Twitter account is added. This is also the place were you set up the Message format. For each account you set up you can choose to auto-publish or not.
NextScripts has extensive documentation about setting up accounts and formatting the message. So I will leave it to this.
The Settings page
On the settings page you set up the general options for the plugin.
First thing you do is setting up the autoposting options:
Publish Immediately – Once you click “Publish” button plugin will start pushing your update to all configured social networks. You need to wait and look at the turning circle. Some APIs are pretty slow, so you have to wait and wait and wait until all updates are posted and control released back to you.
Use WP Cron to Schedule autoposts – Will release the control immediately back to you, so you can proceed with something else and will schedules all auto-posting jobs to your WP-Cron. This is much faster and much more efficient, but it could not work if your WP-Cron is disabled or broken.
Next important option is setting up the autoposting filters.
All other settings:
- User Privileges/Security
- Interface
- URL Shortener
- Auto-Import comments from Social Networks
- URL Parameters
- Auto-HashTags Settings
- %ANNOUNCE% tag settings
- “Open Graph” Tags
- Advanced “Featured” Image Settings
- Alternative “Featured Image” location
- System Settings
After setting up the accounts and setting up the general options, it is time to publish a new post and see what happens on your social network timelines when you hit “Publish”!
Reposting older posts
It is great to automatically publish your new post to your social networks. But how about your older posts? As long as they are up-to-date, you want people to read them. This is where SNAP comes in.
With the reposter option you can repost older content to all the social networks you have made an account for in the accounts page.
As you can see in the screenshot, you can schedule your reposting actions any way you want. After setting the schedule, you choose which networks should be used.
Tip: do you want different schedules for different social networks? Set up different reposter actions. You can have as many reposter actions as you want. This way you can set up a different way of reposting for each social network. This is especially important when a social networks had limits for automatic posting.
The Quick Post Option
A very nice feature of SNAP is the Quick Post option. With quick post you can easily send a new post to all the desired social network at once. Maybe you want to send out a message about your upcoming sales? Or announce some changes on your website? Just write the post, choose the desired networks, and choose to send the post immediately or schedule it for a specific moment!
Why I use it
I use the SNAP Autoposter on World of WordPress. After searching for the right plugin to autopost to several social networks, I ended up with SNAP. And paid for the PRO version and Premium API. This way I can promote all the good content curated on World of WordPress and help the authors get some more attention.
NextScripts has extensive documentation on how to set up the plugin and the accounts. I didn’t have to use their support to set it all up.
The plugin itself is fairly easy to configure. It takes some time to set it up, especially because you have to set up apps for the social networks that have their native API. And also, you must be registered on all social networks you want to publish on.
One of the nicest things while setting up all accounts is the possibility to send a test message to the account you’re setting up. This way you can adjust the message format exactly to your liking, before your start autoposting.
I can recommend this plugin to anyone who wants to autopublish to a large number of social networks. It never stops working. You can set it up and forget all about it. Until you discover posts don’t show up on a social network. Because you had to change your password and forget do change it in SNAP….
Start autoposting!
You can start autoposting to social networks with the free edition of SNAP. You can download it here.
Do you need more? Get the PRO version and the Premium API and autopost without limitations!
