Anyone who has developed for wordpress will tell you – setting up auto publishing for Facebook and Twitter is not fun. Sure, there are plenty of plugins available to do this for you. Some are even pretty great – like Simple Facebook Connect, which puts in all the fun header code that makes Facebook happy, as well as a slew of other features. But there are still annoying issues with users losing authentication, forgetting to login to Facebook to connect to the app, posts simply not showing up because of video embeds, etc. Granted, a lot of this stems from Facebook’s api being a big headache, but try to explain that to a client and all they hear is “I can’t make it work.”
On the twitter side, things are a little less buggy, but the biggest issue is that no plugins will tweet scheduled posts. This is a very big concern for someone like me, who writes most of his blogs on the weekends but prefers to publish them during the week.
I spent many hours tearing my hair out looking for a solution before finally realizing it was right in front of me all along: Feedburner. Such a simple solution! Setting up your blog feed through Feedburner takes roughly 2 minutes and using their “publicize” tab, you can connect it to your twitter account. Whenever the feed updates, new tweets go out for each new item.
The next step is connecting that to Facebook, which is easily done with Selective Tweets. Set your Feedburner twitter settings to automatically add #fb to the end of your tweets, connect your twitter account to Facebook via Selective Tweets and you are good to go.
Note: this post is also a test of this idea since I haven’t actually done it yet. Sounds good in theory though.
Update: Worked perfectly.