Posting and Scheduling Updates to Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus

Posting and scheduling updates to social media timelines is a heck of a lot faster and more fun if you use available services and tools. WordPress plugins are also available for many of these applications, which facilitates posting WordPress posts directly to social media.

Free Online Posting and Scheduling Services

Bufferapp.com is an excellent service that posts to either or both of Facebook, Twitter, and Google  Plus timelines, including business and fan pages. The posts can be published immediately, scheduled at regular intervals throughout the day, or scheduled for a particular day and time. The free version is most suited to a single business channel, as posts can go to multiple media sites at once. The paid pro version allows connections involving multiple businesses.

Buffer can be installed as a Chrome extension (see below), and also integrates with some WordPress plugins, such as WP to Buffer.

Hootsuite.com allows posting and scheduling to up to five media sites; unlike the Buffer app, however, the five media sites are can more easily target profiles from different businesses. Hootsuite does not allow pre-defined scheduling intervals, but does allow day and time scheduling. Like BufferApp, Hootsuite can also be installed as a Chrome extension, and it integrates with some WordPress plugins, such as WP Hootsuite Dashboard.

WordPress Posting to Facebook

A variety of plugins are available for posting WordPress material directly to Facebook. These include:

Chrome Extensions for Posting Updates

The Chrome browser supports several excellent and useful extensions for posting social media updates. The extensions ‘pull in’ information from whatever website page one is browsing. Search for chrome extensions here (the Chrome browser must be installed on your computer).

Bufferapp & Hootsuite extensions – both of these are very useful; see more information above about these services.

AddThis – Share & Bookmark – this extension will post to a large number of media sites (one at a time), including Facebook business and fan pages; it’s an extremely useful posting extension. Note that posting is immediate and hence not scheduled; AddThis will post to a personal Google Plus timeline, but not to a business timeline.

Share on Google Plus Page – this extension is one of the few apps that will share to Google Plus business timelines; posting can be set up for a number of Google Plus pages.

Shareaholic for Google Chrome – we have yet to explore this extension, but it seems to have a combination of features noted above (but without the ability to post to Google Plus business pages).

Try some of these extensions and feel free to post your thought, comments, and about other apps that you may have found that will expedite social media posting!

Tips: Google “bufferapp vs hootsuite” for posts that highlight the distinction.

Useful Resources: How to Post to Facebook from WordPress, from the Elegant Themes blog.

The Best Social Media Monitoring Tools – great post on Elegant Themes about monitoring your social media sites.

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