Social Media Integration Plugins to Save you Time

From the FinallyFast Help Desk:

Keeping up your primary WordPress blog is tough enough. Additional social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Posterous—are extremely appealing, but you might be afraid of multiplying your work. The answer is cross-posting and integration, and here are a few plugins you can use to automate your cross-posts and ditch the hassle of separately posting your content to four different platforms.

Wordbooker – There are a few Facebook integration plugins, but I like Wordbooker for its relatively rich set of features. You’ll be best served by carefully examining all of the plugin’s various options and toggles to determine the cross-post strategy that’s best for you. At the most basic level, Wordbooker automatically posts an excerpt of your WordPress entry onto your Facebook wall, with a backlink for users to read your entire blog article. Everything (and I mean everything), from the display font of the Facebook Like button to the length of the excerpt that appears on Facebook, is customizable. You can tweak your cross-posting for each entry, but obviously the goal is to save time, so spend the time setting your options prior to your first post, and then keep those settings in place for each subsequent post.

Importantly, you can also elect to back-post (is that a word?) any Facebook comments to your WordPress article’s comment page. For true integration and cross-posting goodness, consider this option.

Twitter Tools – You can probably guess that Twitter Tools allows you to automatically post notifications and backlinks of blog articles to your Twitter account. It’s a simpler tool than Wordbooker, which makes sense—Twitter is simpler than Facebook! In fact, the hardest part will be initially linking your WordPress to your Twitter—it requires hunting around for a few long “Access Token” character strings in Twitter, but the plugin’s tutorial is pretty clear about how to do that.

One option in Twitter Tools allows you to “go the other way” and automatically create blog posts from your tweets, and this brings me to a larger point. Usually, you’ll want cross-posting to be a one-way street. That is, you want to post your content to your flagship WordPress blog, and from there that content should trickle down automatically to your other platforms. Trickling up—making your brief Facebook posts or tweets into blog posts—rarely makes sense. Reserve your WordPress platform for permanent, quality, long-form content. You shouldn’t clog up your blog with the ephemera of Facebook and Twitter.

Tumblrize – our final weapon in the arsenal is Tumblrize, which cross-posts to Tumblr as well as Posterous. If you’re not familiar with these platforms, they are particularly useful for effortless posting of multimedia content, and their simple interfaces are nice for mobile blogging. All you need for Tumblrize is a Tumblr email and password.

Tags: facebook, Plugins, Posterous, Social Media, Tumblr, Tumblrize, Twitter, Twitter Tools, Wordbooker, wordpress