How I Cross-Post Updates to Social Media

Digital Inspiration has an active presence across all social media websites – from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn – and as soon as a new article is published on the site, updates are sent out to all the difference social channels. The social media publishing strategy is partly automated and partly manual for sites like Pinterest and Google+ that do not allow automated posting. Also, I am not using services like dlvr.it that monitor RSS feeds and cross-post updates almost immediately to Twitter and Facebook channels. The reason being that handcrafted social updates tend to perform better than ones containing only post titles picked from the RSS feed. I have connected my Twitter account, Facebook Page, LinkedIn Page and the Google+ page to Buffer. When I am ready to share an article, I simply open the Buffer add-on, write a message and share. In some cases, it helps to include an image with the social update and Buffer makes that easy as well. While you are on a page, hover your mouse over any image on that page and a little Buffer icon appears. When you click that icon, the actual image is included in the update along with a link to the containing page. Here are some tweets posted through Buffer that contain images and as well as links. Learn to code in the comfort of your browser http://t.co/P1ryxSe2aY pic.twitter.com/g3OSlceH52 — Amit Agarwal (@labnol) June 12, 2014 You can only post to a limited number of your social channels through the free version of Buffer but, as a workaround, you can install a couple of IFTTT recipes that will further propagate your Buffer updates to other non-supported channels. I have created recipes that automatically send updates posted on Buffer to Tumblr (link) and my LinkedIn profile (link). I have another IFTTT recipe that takes the first picture from my RSS feed and uploads it to Flickr while adding the post excerpt in the picture description. Here’s a screenshot image posted on Flickr through IFTTT. This does help improve visibility of your stuff in Google Images and other visual search engines. For Twitter, I have configured the large summary card so an large image from the post is automatically shown when someone expands the tweet on the Twitter website. This tends to perform than regular summary cards where a small cropped image is shown inside the tweet. Finally, I manually share links on Google+ since they do not allow automated posting on Google+ Profiles. Since Buffer has already published the update on the Google+ Page, I just use the share option to post that same update on my Google+ profile – this saves some time and also exposes the site’s Google+ Page to my Google+ followers. This story, How I Cross-Post Updates to Social Media, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 04/08/2014 under Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Internet

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