Automatically posting to your social media pages from your website
Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc can be a very useful marketing channel for your business. It doesn't cost anything to post content and you can reach an audience of potential customers without spending on advertising.
For many businesses these days, part of a marketing persons role is to regularly post content to the companies social media pages to create brand awareness or to advertise special offers etc. Some larger businesses even employ an external company to manage their social media channels, to ensure a constant stream of content reaches their followers.
What if you are running a smaller business that doesn't have the internal resources or the budget to hire an external company?
One solution is to automate the process of posting content to your social media pages. If you already add content to your own website on a regular basis and then someone manually posts a link to that content on Facebook for example, you can instead automate this process so that your website content gets picked up and posted to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and more, automatically without you having to do anything!
Different businesses add lots of different types of content that they would like to reach as wide an audience as possible. For example a recruitment agency adding jobs to their website, or an engineering firm adding new projects they have completed, or an e-commerce store adding new products to their site.
There are endless types of content and reasons to post that content to social media pages and if you are already adding it to your website you should definitely make use of the free advertising opportunities to post links to your content on social media, or if you already posting to social media pages manually, then make things more efficient and save some time by automating the process.
So how can you set this up and how does it work?
There are many different ways to achieve this, different website platforms have different plugins or modules that can automatically post to social media pages. One of the issues with this approach is that you may need several different plugins to post to different social networks like Facebook and Twitter etc.
Another potential issue is that the plugin or module could be designed to only handle certain types of content, or there could be limitations to what can or cannot be posted from your website. A third problem is that Facebook and others regularly change how their system works and are constantly updating the way that other websites connect to them, this can mean that plugins and modules break and no longer work, so you are left waiting for the plugin to be updated before everything works again.
A better approach, and the one which we use for our own clients, is to use a dedicated 3rd party service whose sole purpose is to automatically post your content to multiple different social media pages. We build customised 'feeds' of the content you want to post to social media, we make these feeds available to the 3rd party service and they take care of automatically posting the content to your social media pages.
The big advantage of this method is that you never have to worry about a plugin or module breaking, the 3rd party service continually updates their systems on a daily basis to ensure your posting to social media continues uninterrupted. Another advantage is that they can handle absolutely any kind of content with no limitations, because we are building a customised feed of data to supply to them.
This is far more flexible and puts you in control, we can craft and curate your feeds to contain specific content for specfic social media platforms for example, instead of being at the mercy of how a plugin or module wants to handle it.
These types of 3rd party services do normally charge a monthly fee, but we have agency subscriptions in order to supply this service to our clients, so our clients don't pay anything at all. If you are interested in having automated social media posting set up for your own website, just get in touch.
