Many WordPress bloggers like to be the original sharer of their newly posted content. They may share it to Facebook or any other social site like Twitter. What they essentially do is write their blog post, and then share the content on the Facebook page that was created specific for their web site. This, for the most part is a manual process. While it my be outsourced, there is a better and simpler way that is free.
Automation in online marketing can be a negative thing, but there are some reasonable means for automation that don’t include spamming or any non-white hat approach to marketing. Auto sharing of content can be one such example.
While we are talking about linking our WordPress blog to Facebook in this post, this approach can be used to also share content to Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and others. Sure, there are already ways to share content to Twitter automatically, but for the most part we haven’t been able to do that for Facebook or Google+.
Create Your First Recipe on IFTTT
Let’s walk through the entire process for creating a recipe on IFTTT. For this example I will automate the task of sharing a new post from my WordPress blog to my Facebook page.
1) Create an account at ifttt.com.
2) Click on the My Recipes menu item across the top (far left menu option).
3) Click the Create a Recipe button.
4) Click the hyperlinked word “this” in the if-this-then-that statment to add the “trigger.”
5) Choose a “trigger.” In this case we will pick WordPress. If it is not already activated, click the Activate button as well. Note: Both self-hosted blogs (version 3.x) and WordPress.com blogs will work with the IFTTT WordPress Channel.
6) Enter the URL, username, and password for your WordPress blog.
7) Click Activate. Click Done. ClickContinue to the next step.
8) Once the WordPress channel is activated, you have two options for the “trigger.” You can choose between: “this trigger fires every time you publish a new post,” and “this trigger fires every time you publish a new post with a specific tag or in a specific category.”
For this example, I chose the first option since I want all posts added to my Facebook page.
9) There is nothing specific to add in this step (like there would be for specific categories or tags), so just click the Create Trigger button.
10) Now, click the hyperlinked word “that” in the if-this-then-that statment to add the “action.”
11) Choose Facebook Pages (be sure it’s “Pages” and not “Facebook” unless you want it to go on your personal timeline) as the Action Channel.
12) Login to your the Facebook account that controls your Facebook page in a separate window
13) Click the Activate button.
14) Click OK providing you are OK with giving IFTTT access to all that is displayed. Click OK 2 more times (assuming again that you agree with granting further access).
15) Click the Done button. Click Continue to the next step.
16) Next you have the option of placing a new plain text status message, creating a link post, or adding a photo to an album. In this example I will be choosing the option:Create a link post.
17) For this action you will be creating a Link URL and Message for the link post on your Facebook page. You will be choosing from various WordPress “ingredients” which include: Post URL (use this for Link URL), Post Title (perfect for the “Message” field), Post Content (may work for “Message”), First Image URL, Tags and Categories, and Post Date. Plus of course you can add your own text. You can also leave the “message” part blank as Facebook will automatically pull in some values from the blog post (namely title, image and description).
18) Click the Create Action button.
19) You then add a description so that you can know what it’s about when looking through all your recipes later. You will also have the option to share the recipe idea publicly. You can include hash tags to allow the recipe to be found more easily. I think this step really is more for companies/web sites creating recipes to help with some promotion for their channels (or their sites attached to the RSS channel).
20) Click the Create Recipe button.
Using OpenGraph Tags When Sharing Content to Facebook
When sharing a link to Facebook, whether manually or automatically (as described above), Facebook will pull in certain elements from the page associated with the link. There will be a title, image, and content snippet. In many cases, Facebook makes the best guess as to what to include for those three elements.
The title is easy and usually accurate. The image may end up being the logo or an image from an advertisement on the page and may not be relevant to the post at all. The description is often just a snippet from the page and will work in a lot of cases (but not always) but sometimes it is better to control that value as well. OpenGraph tags allow you to do that.
Some SEO plugins (Yoast’s All In One WordPress SEO plugin for example) can be used to create extra fields in the add/edit post/page screens in WordPress allowing you to customize those values, so that Facebook doesn’t have to guess on what to use.
There is a meta element with the propertly value of “og:title” that could be placed within the “head” tags of the HTML to indicate the title to use when sharing content to Facebook. “og:description” is used for the content snippet, and “og:image” tells Facebook what to use as the image for the post.
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