Welcome to another Blogger Series post. Today’s topic is about setting up your blog so that your posts are shared on social media automatically.
The importance of sharing
So you’ve spent your time crafting blog posts that inspire, educate or amuse. Now what? While it might be nice to sit back and wait for hordes of people to come swarming to your blog, that doesn’t usually happen without help.
You need to encourage people to visit your blog. The best way to do that is to share it around.
Social media is great for sharing your posts. Not only do your followers see the posts and are encouraged to visit the blog to read it, but they may share it themselves on their own feeds.
Working smarter not harder
The longer you blog the more you realise how much work it takes and so anything that can reduce your workload is great in my opinion.
When I first started blogging I never shared my blog. That was because I wasn’t on social media. When I finally got social media, I would share my posts manually. Not too bad since I only wrote one post a week.
Now I post four times week and I just don’t have time to share my posts on all my social media platforms.
That’s why it’s useful to set up automatic sharing as soon as possible. Automation is your friend.
How to initiate automatic sharing
Go to My Site in the top left corner to open the dashboard. Scroll down to Configure and you’ll see Sharing.
This will bring up Publicize your Posts under the Connections tab. Here you will find a list of social media platforms. You can “Connect” to any of the ones you have accounts with. This will create the automatic sharing. To remove them, click Disconnect.
A note on sharing
One issue with automation is that if you have more than one image on your article, the social media platforms will sometimes grab the “wrong” image to place in the feed.
It is one of the reasons I have stopped my automation with Facebook because it was always picking the wrong image. Twitter is a lot better at selecting the right image but even that does mess up sometimes.
So it will depend on your picture selections and whether you are happy with a different picture being chosen from time to time.
Encourage the love of sharing
Another way of sharing your posts is to encourage your readers to share them. So, once you have sorted the connections mentioned above, you can move onto the Sharing Buttons tab.
This will allow you to add or remove different sharing buttons. These are the buttons that appear at the bottom of each post and/or page and allow readers to share your posts on their social media feeds or even reblog them on their own blog.
Next, scroll down and go to the Options. This gives you choices for where you can include your share buttons (eg on all posts, pages, order, feedback etc).
Finally, if you have Twitter and have connected your blog to share automatically on your feed, you will need to enter your Twitter username.
Under the Options section, you will see a place to add your Username (the example of mine below). This means if someone shares it on Twitter it will include your username so people can connect to you on Twitter itself.
Do make sure to click Save. I missed that the first time. Thankfully one of my readers kindly pointed out this error and I was quick to fix it.
To experienced bloggers, do you automatically share on your social media or prefer to do it manually?
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I’ll be back tomorrow, with a new World Builder post. As always, leave me your thoughts in the comments below and if you want to see something specific on this blog, drop me a message.
Happy writing
Ari
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As always you have an amazing way of explaining things.
Facebook, I have discovered, is a giant pain and I don’t know why that is. They seem to have lost their identity.
Thank you for this. You’re the best!
Thank you so much Bryan. 🙂 I appreciate your kind words.
I know what you mean, I am forever on the fence about leaving Facebook. It seems to have completely lost its way.
Great advice, thanks Ari. Did you know that you can also add sharing buttons for social media sites that WordPress do not include in their lineup? I’ve added a Flipboard sharing button to my blog. It now appears on every post I publish. I also used to have one for StumbleUpon, but I’ve removed now because StumbleUpon has moved over to a new social media platform. I’m trying it out and will add a sharing button for it if it proves successful in bringing in traffic to my blog.
Thanks for reading Hugh’s. I had heard you could add some others on. I haven’t sorted that yet. I heard StumbleUpon had changed to another platform.
Great advice, as always. This tool has saved me so much time over the years.
Thanks Rachel. I know what you mean. 😀
Reblogged this on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog and commented:
Great tutorial from Ari 👍😃
Thanks Chris for reblogging 😀
You can reselect the images on Facebook and Twitter, Ari – Gee explains how in one of her posts at:
https://thewritingchimp.com/2018/05/29/wordpress-tips-featured-image-not-updating-blogging-wordpress/
I’ll give it a read. Last time I looked into it, it wouldn’t let me select the images I wanted. Thanks for giving me the link, Chris! 😀
Welcome, Ari – it also seems to help if a blog featured image (minimum 300 pixels high) is selected before posting 😎
I share automatically. And I agree with Suzanne, I wish your helpful posts were around when I first started. 😊
lol aww thanks Lorraine! 😀
It’s always good to share your posts around. It would be nice to auto pin but I can’t seem to be able to do that.
Auto posters can be pretty good too ☺️
It would be nice to auto pin via WordPress, but I do like using Buffer to schedule my posts as pins 😀
Can you do they with buffer? I didn’t know. I might have to look at that
Yes you can schedule posts to pin them on boards. You can to manually add them but you can schedule loads over weeks (if you have the paid version) so I have them pinning every day 🙂 It has made a big difference
I’ll have to look at this – finding a way to pin automatically would be useful.
So many people have siad that Pinterest is the key to more views.
I have to admit since I started scheduling articles to pin regularly and consistently I’ve had a surge on my blog.
I need to start doing this, I’ve been told the Pinterest is the key to increase blog views. I need to sort it… But oh my time is short.
I know what you mean, there always seems to be so much we need to do and so little time. Using buffer has seriously helped me become more productive but i still have so much more i need to do and learn.
I’ve been sharing them automatically from the beginning. I also re-share them manually on their anniversaries on some, though not all, of my social media links.
oooh I love the idea of re-sharing them on their anniversaries! What a great idea! Thanks for sharing that
You’re welcome.
I wish I had your guide when I started out blogging. Great stuff, Ari.
lol awww thanks Suzanne! I have enjoying writing this series but it’s also a painful reminder of all the mistakes I made to learn all this!
Lovely post… Ari you are awesome… Have I told you that lately?
lol aww, thanks Shalini you are so sweet! 😀