Sharing your WordPress posts to social media is a popular way to broadcast new blog entries and promote existing content. However, planning and executing a social sharing strategy can become a resource-intensive task. Thankfully, there are a myriad of tools available to help you save some time.
Thisย article willย reveal foursย methods for sharing WordPress posts, including plugins,ย scheduling tools, and social networksโ built-in options. Letโs get started!
Why Sharing Your WordPress Posts Is Important
Sharing WordPress posts to social mediaย can be a core component of your social media marketing strategy. It can not only helpย drive targeted traffic to your site, it can alsoย help yourย siteโs Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Even though weโre all aware that social media marketing is powerful, the statistics really hammer the pointย home. For example,ย 76% of people use their Facebook feed to find interesting content, andย 43% of consumers are more likely to buy a product they learned about on social media.
Thankfully, when it comes to sharing WordPress posts, there are lots of toolsย available to help you. Letโs take a look at four different ways you can share your WordPress posts to social media.
Sharing canย happen in a variety of ways, whether through readers themselves,ย automated using a tool or plugin, or simply using a platformโs built-in settings. By mixing and matching all of these techniques, you stand to get your content shared as much as possible. Letโs take a look at the four ways toย implement these strategies and get sharing!
Weโll start off with a content sharing strategy that requires very little work on your part. Of course, youย donโt want to be the onlyย one sharing your content; hopefully others will want to share it too. To that end, you can encourageย website visitors to share your postsย by adding share buttons to your pages โ and the easiest way to do this is withย a dedicated plugin, such as our own Monarch:
This pluginย makes it simple for you to harness the power of social media by adding beautifully styled sharing and follow buttons almost anywhere on your site. You canย choose from over 20 social networks, and all of Monarchโs front end sharing buttons are highly customizable so you can tailor their look to suit your site and catch the eye of your visitors.
You can alsoย choose fromย six different button locations, and six triggers to initiate the pop-up. These include actions such as commenting or purchasing, as well as timed inactivity or a simple timed delay.
While Monarch is a natural fit for anyone with an Elegant Themes membership, there are lots of other options too. A popular free choice isย MashShare, and a solid premium optionย is Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress.
Getting started with Monarch is simple. Once youโve installed and activated the plugin, navigate toย Toolsย >ย Monarch Settingsย in your WordPress dashboard. The first screen youโll see is the Locations tab, where you canย choose whereย your buttons willย appear. Click on your desired location(s), and youโll see a green check mark for all the ones youโve selected. Donโt forget to hit Save Changes at the bottom when youโre done:
The next tab isย Networks.ย This enables you to add the networks youโd like your visitors to be able to share to. Click on the gray Add Networks button, and youโll seeย a pop-up displayingย all of the social platforms available.ย Choose the ones you want, and again youโll see a check mark next to your selections.
The rest of theย tabs enable youย to customize each of your chosen button locations.ย Features such as size, shape, color, and counts can all be changed, and you can also decide which pages you want the buttons to appear on.
Now that youโve made it simple for others to share your posts, itโs time to do some sharing of your own. Wouldnโt it be nice if every time you published a post in WordPress, it automatically appeared on all of your social networks too? Jetpackโs Publicize can make that happen.
Jetpack is a robust, Swiss army knifeย plugin, and itย includes plenty of functionality related to engagement such as providing site stats and enabling comments through social media platforms. It also has security functionality, tools for enhancing the appearance of your site, and more.
Of course, there are lots of other plugins you can employ to automatically share your posts, including NextScripts and HYPESocial โ Buffer PRO.
Althoughย someย WordPress users complain about Jetpack being bloated, its functionality is used every day by many. One of its great features, which weโll look at more closely here, is Publicize.ย This tool connects to your social media platforms, and enables you to share your posts automatically โ as soon as theyโre published.
To begin, first install and activate the Jetpack pluginย if you need to, then in your dashboard, navigateย to Jetpackย >ย Settings.ย From here,ย go to the Engagement tab, and make sure Publicize is in the blue position:
Next, click on the arrow to the right and select Configure Your Publicize Settings.ย Here, you can select the social media platforms you want to publish to, then follow theย prompts to connect your accounts:
When you go into your post editor, youโll see that your connectedย social media accounts appear in the Publishย meta box:
Your posts will now automatically be shared to these accounts. If you donโt want to share a post, you can go into Edit Details and uncheck the accounts you donโt want to share to.
3. Schedule Your Posts Using Buffer
Aside from sharing your posts automatically, you might also want to schedule the sharing of posts at various points in the future. Doing so can ensure you maintain a presence and reach readers at the right time.ย Some networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, offer the opportunity to schedule future posts from within the platform itself. However, others, such as Google+ and LinkedInย donโt have this feature.
Fortunately,ย there are tools that can post on your behalf, including Hootsuite, CoSchedule, and Buffer.ย Aside from scheduling posts in advance, they also enable you to manage multiple social media platforms within a single interface. Our recommendation (Buffer)ย has a narrow learning curve:
This toolย enables you to optimize your social media strategyย by scheduling posts atย various times of the day. If you useย more than one social media platform for your business, this can save a lot of time switching from one application to another.
Buffer does have its downsides, including limitationsย in performingย certain other social media tasks. However, if youโre looking for something simple to use, and free to boot, it could be ideal.
To start, navigate to the website, andย sign up with your chosenย social media platform (you can add the others later):
Once inside,ย you can connect more networks by clicking on the icons down the left-hand side of the screen. To schedule a post, firstly select which networks you want to share to by clicking on their icons. Next,ย click on the What do you want to share? box, which expands to enable you to compose your post:
Add your link and any optional text,ย then select the arrow next to the Add to Queue button for your scheduling options:
Share Next willย share it at the next posting timeย specified in the Schedule tab, and Share Now will share it immediately. To input a specific date and time, click on Schedule Post and use the displayed calendar andย clockย (noting the time zone at the bottom).
Sometimes the features provided by your social media platform of choice are ideal for simple sharing. Each platform will have differing levels of intuitiveness, but they also provide helpful support documentation to get you up and running. For the uninitiated, here are resources for some of the major platforms:
- Facebook: Share yourย URL to your personal profile or Page.
- Twitter: Add yourย link to a Tweet.
- Pinterest: Create a โPinโย for your URL.
- Google+: Share a post that includes your link.
While some networks donโt have a built-in scheduling option, others, including Facebook and Twitter,ย enable you to schedule posts in advance.ย However, itโs worth bearing in mind that there are caveats to who can use these features, such as Page owners on Facebook and business users on Twitter. Standard profiles donโt have the capacity to schedule posts within either platform.
As mentioned, Facebook doesnโt have a feature for scheduling posts to personal profiles, but it doesย enable you to schedule posts to Pages. Log into your Page and begin creating your post as you normally would, including the link to the WordPressย post you want to share.
Once written, you would usuallyย hit the Publish button at the bottom right hand corner of the window. Instead, click on the small arrow next to it, and select Schedule from the drop-down. Atย the Schedule Postย screen, enter the publication date and time:
Now you can happily schedule posts in advance, and spend the rest of your time focusing on other tasks.
Conclusion
Sharing your WordPress posts across your social media channels can be an excellent way to engage new and existing readers. However, keeping up with a demanding social media strategy can become resource-intensive.
Thankfully, there are ways to keep active on social media without manually posting your content. Weโve revealed four ways you can share your WordPress posts, oftenย without even having to log into social media. Letโs recap them quickly:
- Add social share buttons to your posts with a plugin such asย Monarch.
- Link your social media accounts to Jetpackโs Publicize to autoshare posts as they are published.
- Arrange for your posts to be shared at a later dateย using a scheduling tool such as Buffer.
- Use social media platformsโ built-in settingsย to share your posts orย scheduleย them for the future.
Do you have any questions about sharing WordPress posts? Let us know in the comments section below and donโt forget to subscribe so you can follow the conversation!
Article thumbnail image byย meandre / shutterstock.com
Why there is no sharing for Instagram?
Instagram does not yet offer a sharing capability, hence Monarch does not provide a sharing option for Instagram. If they introduce a sharing feature, I’m sure it will beย added toย Monarch. Monarch offers Social Follow for Instagram though. For additional information, see this link: https://www.elegantthemes.com/documentation/monarch/follow.
really nice and very informative. Really helped me a lot while posting my first wordpress post. I really don’t have any idea about posting then one of friend send me that link and then got idea about posting and many other things related to wordpress. Thanks for this post.
Youโre welcome! Iโm glad our post was so helpful to you. ๐
As usual John, great post, excellent support links. Thanks for always writing quality content.
-dawn
Youโre welcome, Dawn. ๐
Great list! We are currently designing out website and I’ve been doing a ton of research and this just confirms many of the social sharing plugins we chose. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Jason! Iโm glad you found the list useful. ๐
Great tips! Will check these plugins out! ๐ by the way, are these free plugins?
Thanks, Emmerey. Some of the plugins mentioned in this article are free or have free versions, such as MashShare, Jetpack, and NextScripts. Others are quite affordable. If youโre interested in Monarch, youโll just need a Developer subscription to our themes and plugins, which is only $89 per year (https://www.elegantthemes.com/join/).
We also tend to stay away from auto posting tools due to bloat and frequent connection issues. We’ll give Monarch a try and see how it performs. Thanks for the post!
Youโre welcome :). Good luck!
Thanks for this post. I recently started my own blog. This can very helpful
Youโre welcome, Catia!
I use Monarch as a way of “blogging once” in WordPress, then sending the same blogs to “my” social media through Monarch.
Is that how it was intended?
I know users can send to their own social media, so it is a double edged sword for me!
Hi Christopher! Iโm glad you found a way of using Monarch that works for you. ๐
First of all thanks for sharing a very informative blog. I try some of them like buffer and it is very simple to use because you mentioned all the steps as well. Very useful for me looking forward for more new interesting blogs.
Thanks
Thanks for the guide, John, including references to some very telling statistics!
Monarch is definitely an outstanding option for sharing content, and I appreciate the work ET is putting into it. For some feature requests/additional posts on the topic, two come to mind:
1) While Monarch offers an option to track how much different content has been shared, is there a way to track *where* it has been shared? Whenever I see a certain page or post being shared, I’m very curious who shared it and where it now shows up. This would be very useful to know! Is this a functionality that can and will be added to Monarch at some point? If not, how else can one track this?
2) What are some creative ways of customizing Monarch with CSS? The plugin comes with a custom CSS section, so a post would be terrific that outlines some creative ways of applying CSS to add neat styling/functionality to the plugin. ๐
Thanks again for your great work, and I look forward to future posts!
Youโre welcome, Mathias! Those are some great ideas; weโll keep them in mind. ๐ Feel free to register any suggestions in our forums as well (https://www.elegantthemes.com/forum/).
I love Monarch as it is one of the best social sharing plugins that is no-nonsense and gets the job done. BUT, my one major gripe with Monarch is that it is a pain in the butt to configure. It has the worst user experience for a plugin that should be fairly straightforward. I don’t know what they were thinking when they designed it, but it highly unintuitive and favors visual aesthetics over ease of use and functionality.
In all honesty, it needs a complete visual redesign.
Thanks so much for your help. Just starting a new Blog using DIVI and have Monarch but haven’t used it yet. This is just what I was looking for. Thanks
Youโre welcome, Donna! ๐
Tried Jetpack, Hootsuite and Buffer to share posts automatically but so far loving Buffer. Very easy to use but a shame you have to pay if you want to share content on Pinterest.
Hi Chris! While itโs a shame you need to upgrade to share Pinterest posts, Iโm glad you are still finding these plugins useful.
I have to admit that I tend to leave jetpack alone these days due to it’s ‘bloat’ issue, but buffer truly is a great way to share posts with the minimum of effort involved.
It’s also free which should motivate anyone to give it a go.
I agree that Buffer is a great tool โ especially because itโs free. ๐
The concept of Jetpack being too bulky or bloated is a popular one, but personally one I think is now outdated. I think if you read up on Jetpack now the “bloat” issue has been thoroughly debunked for a while.