Would you like to learn how to share new WordPress posts automatically with Zapier to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest because this will save you a lot of time and build backlinks to your website?
Are you ready to see how to get your WordPress blog posts automatically shared out to social media? This is such a valuable timesaver that you're going to love it because it will save you hours every year sharing, and if you're like me, you might not even take the time to actually post your own blog posts over to social media every time you do them, and this will ensure they always consistently go out there in the same format.
I'm using Zapier right now to automate this.
I'll show you how to create this in real time. The first key thing is to picture the workflow you want. You want your blog post taken automatically as soon as it's published and you want that put out in the best format on all the social media accounts you have.
For me, I have Twitter, I have Facebook, I have Pinterest.
There are also other accounts you can use with this. I trust your judgment to get all the ones connected that you want to use.
I actually publish manually to LinkedIn. I have my friend Michel who publishes to LinkedIn and publishes on Medium.
Thus, I don't have those set up on here. I had those previously set up.
This workflow will get you out to these social media accounts, which is very helpful for getting your posts ranked higher in search engines that consider what links back are happening from social media, how much things are being mentioned in social media.
That way if something's going viral on social media, Google figures that is probably worth putting higher in search results as well. The key to set this up is to first get your WordPress website connected in step number one of the Zap. Then add each particular social media account in the format you want it to go out in.
Let's do this now in real time in Zapier. I will start out by going back to all my Zaps here. We're going to make a new Zap. When we begin, we will pick the WordPress Zap.
The trigger event is when we want a new post. You can do this with other options. You can do new post type status, author users, lots of different options with WordPress, you could use to build an automation.
What we're doing specifically here is starting with a new post. A new post is the main thing most of us will want to do. That's the trigger event.
In Zapier, it all begins when something happens with a trigger, then that's where the data is pulled in and all the other steps take place.
We click "Continue" to push on with the Zap. I have my WordPress account that I need to add here. I select my WordPress account that I've already synched up.
You just do this by providing the sign in information that they give you. If this step does not work for you, as it did not work for me. I was getting various errors for this. What you can do to work around those errors is to talk directly with your web hosting provider.
Some web hosting providers will have security set up where you can't use Zapier to sign in directly to WordPress, which is what Zapier needs to do in order to get the data. I was able to message my WordPress host Kinsta and in a few minutes they allowed the port to be open that this uses and now it's working
For years, I just tried to do it manually or use other work arounds, which were terrible and I'm so grateful I've gotten this Zap set up.
Now, if you get any errors here, the first step is to talk to your web host assuming your login page is open. If you've used some kind of log in security solution to hide your login page, you will need to take that off in order for this to work because it uses a default login page.
Once you've got that open, if it gives you some kind of gateway error or some kind of sign in error and you're sure your password and your username are correct, then talk to your web host.
Once you've got the WordPress account successfully connected, you hit "Continue."
What you'll notice in here is in order to have the new posts, you'll need to customize each of these aspects. You can click on "Choose value" in here. You will need to pick that you want a draft, pending review, private or published.
I'm imagining since you want this go out on your social media accounts, this should be super easy, you just hit "Published."
Then, you can choose your post type down here.
I imagine, again, since you want this for social media, you will want to pick "Posts." However, you can pick pages, you can pick media, you can even pick forums or topics you could publish. Every time somebody posted a new forum posts, you could put that out automatically on your social media.
You can even do things like if you've got other plugins, they will have more options. For example when I publish a new WooCommerce product on my website, I could automatically share that as a post.
It's nice to know these options are so deep. However, practically you'll just want to use the published posts in this. Whichever of these you pick will be the only data you get going forward.
Therefore, choose what you want to do such as published posts. Click "Continue."
Now in order to make sure this is working, you will want to test it to make sure that you're getting the kind of data you think you should be getting. I'll hit "Test & Review" and this will give me a list of my recent posts. I click on this post here. It shows me "WooCommerce Direct Checkout," which was just published today on my WordPress website a few hours ago.
I know from seeing this data that it is working correctly. I can see the actual post content in here, which is really good because I can use that if I wanted to. I could set up a more complicated Zap, for example, to filter if there's any certain thing in the post or in the category.
What's important now is that I verify this is working how I think it should be working. I've got proof that my new posts are showing up here one after another. That's great.
I click on "Done editing."
Now I'm ready to start publishing these out to social media.
The question is what social media accounts do I want to use and what formats am I going to put these in?
Step one, pick a social media account to begin with, one at a time. You can look at the options and all the different apps. I do not currently have a way I know of to publish to YouTube. You've got Facebook. You just can use either Facebook pages or Facebook groups.
Unfortunately, you cannot use your own profile currently through any method I see to share directly to your Facebook profile. You still need to manually do that. However, with Facebook pages and Facebook groups you can share out there. Facebook groups are an outstanding way to share your posts if you've got a group, you could share them automatically there. I use the Facebook pages app to share to mine.
You've got Twitter you can use. You've got LinkedIn that you can post directly to, I believe you have Tumbler, you've got Pinterest. There are tons of different applications on here you can use.
What I want to start with is to go over to "Facebook Pages." I want to make a Facebook page post every time I've got a new WordPress post. Thus, I choose the application first, then I pick the option.
There are a few different options you can do. You can either do a page post or a page photo. if you do a page post it will just share it with the link. Sometimes it will do a good job of getting the attachment correctly shared out there. Other times it won't. The page photo will make a bigger impression in the newsfeed. However, it will have less of a chance for someone to click on the actual link.
I like using the "Create Page Photo" because it takes up a lot more room in the news feed.
If you go over here to just the page post, often when I did that in the past, it did not work. It just shared this little text blurb and it didn't have any image or attachment on it. It didn't look very good and nobody was engaging with it.
I use the page photo. However, the best thing to do is to test and see which one you like better. Thus, I can test this right now as a page post to see how it comes out on my Facebook profile and decide whether I like it or not. What I will do though for this is we will just create it through a photo. I click "Continue."
Now I need to pick my Facebook pages account. I've already synched that and connected it. Click on "Continue."
Now for the page, if you need to sync that, just go through and log in, give the appropriate pages permission that you want to use in the Zaps, then you'll be ready to proceed.
When you customize, you first need to pick the page. I've got Jerry Banfield and it's where I want to publish. Now I need to pull the photo directly from the WordPress post. Then I need to pull some kind of a description directly from the WordPress post as well.
To begin with I pick where the photo is in all these options, so I go through to show all options in here. What I can see is I've got all of this data and what I need to do is find the specific image for this. I look for anything that says image in it. I've got post thumbnail, post thumbnail image metadata. We need this one "Post Thumbnail."
I can also use post thumbnail metadata. I don't think these actually work. I just want to grab right here "Post Thumbnail."
Now it says, "No data" right now, so I can go back to look through and see which data it is. Sometimes you just need to play around with these to make sure you get the exact correct field, and then if you don't just test it, make sure it comes out correctly. You can see all these different options on here.
Sometimes it can be difficult to find, just keep scrolling through and look for it. Make sure you get the right link. Here's what I want right here: "Post Thumbnail Link."
That will give me the correct image. This gives me the actual thumbnail. I can also check to see if there's anything that might work better, if there's a full size file that I can use, I can do the post thumbs. I don't want the metadata on here since I just want the actual image itself. This one on here is only an 80 by 80 image and that will be a bit too small. I don't want something that is small with it. I want the largest size that I can get to post the best looking image on Facebook.
I've got the file over here, therefore I want the biggest possible image for it. Ideally the biggest possible image shouldn't have any sizes.
This is generally where you've got to put the most work in grabbing the exact correct length. This one is what I want right here because this has the raw upload. It doesn't have anything else added, so that is the correct link I want right there.
You just find "Post Thumbnail Link" and or anything else that's appropriate based on how your data is set up.
Now the second thing I want to do, I need to add a description.
Since this is a photo, the description must include the link to it. The description also needs to talk about what the photo's about. Therefore I need to key pieces. What I like to do is I put the post title in here and then make sure there is a space, and then the link.
That way I have the title of the post and it as the link to my blog with a picture from the thumbnail. Then I've got that done. I click on "Continue."
Now we can get an idea of exactly what this will look like. It will have this photo and it will have this description, "WooCommerce Direct Checkout" and a link to my website.
I can click on "Test & Review" to see how it comes out on the Facebook page and this is a very important step to make sure everything is working correctly as you expect it to work.
What I will do now is I will hit "Test & Review" on this to see how it actually comes out on my Facebook page and I do my teaching in real time, which makes it fun to see if I actually did it correctly here too.
We'll go over to my Facebook page, see what this post actually looks like. You always test one thing at a time and don't worry about posting something that doesn't come out right. Just immediately go delete it if it doesn't come out how you want.
What we can see is this came out correctly. This you can see the photo is posted up on my website here and it's, this is exactly what it looks like.
You've got the photo here, you've got the link to it now. That worked correctly.
Now isn't that nice when it comes out just like that?
That's so easy to use. It's very functional. We've got the link here. We've got the picture here. We've got the text here. We've got all the essentials.
Let's say this came out horrible. All I do is just go over to this and click on "Delete from page," and click on "Delete photo," no big deal.
Now what you may want to do is try and see different formats. Let's say, I think I would prefer to have this come out as something else. We will go back up to choose an event. We will click on "Create Page Post." Let's do a page post instead of a page photo and see what this looks like.
We'll continue. I'll go do this one faster. I pick my page and I'll pick the link URL in here.
We just put the link URL and we'll put the message in as the post title.
Now let's see how this comes out.
We click on "Continue."
We'll click "Test & Review" and we'll see how this looks different on the Facebook page versus that photo and we can decide what format we actually want to put these in.
It's well worth it to invest your time in taking a deep look at how each of these will work because you're going to be doing this automatically every day and you want to make sure you're really happy with it.
I'm actually happier now that Facebook has updated how these shared. I'm much happier putting out a direct link like this because this is one huge clickable image instead of just being a photo, this is what I am changing my format to because this works a lot better than photos now.
It makes it very clear that it's on my website and has a huge clickable link. This is ideal in terms of linking my website.
Now, if I hadn't gone through and tested each of those, how would I know which format I like better?
Once you've got a format you're very happy with, you can just click "Done." You can put each of these individual tasks into one Zap and doing each of them in one Zap is a good way to do it because if anything breaks with one particular Zap, like if your Facebook connection breaks and your Facebook is in the first part of your workflow, it will actually stop it from getting shared out to all the rest on social media.
Therefore, doing one of these individually in one single Zap is ideal. However, if you want to make sure these are all in one workflow, it is easier to build all of these into one workflow instead of having them on all different Zaps because then you've got to track each specific Zap.
In the next post, I will show you how to continue this workflow with Twitter and Pinterest.
I love you.
You鈥檙e awesome.
I appreciate the chance to serve you today and I will see you again soon.
Love,
Jerry Banfield
Edits from video transcript by Michel Gerard.
