When you publish your blog it’s very convenient to inform the world something new has been published.  Also, back links on other websites help improve your Search Engine Rankings, so it’s another good reason to be linking your blog posts wherever it is permissible to do so. 

Note, when we refer to “websites” in the title we mean Social Media and Social Book Marking websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious and so on, not random blogs and forums which may or may not approve of you linking to them.

Now you can do this manually by copying and pasting the blog post’s URL into each website, but if you’re doing this for 20 different websites each time you submit a new post, it’s going to become quite tiring.  Ideally what you need is an automated system which posts to Social Media websites for you.

Fortunately there are a few different solutions available!  Most make use of your blog’s RSS or News Feed, which contain the post title, excerpt, a thumbnail of the main image if applicable and a link to the actual blog post. 

Twitterfeed

This utility allows you to automatically post blog permalinks to Twitter, Facebook (including profiles and pages) and Linkedin.  It gives you some options to tweak your submissions by filtering out certain words, or adding a prefix or suffix to your updates.  It also enables you to set the Update Frequency, so you can have it checking for new material every 30 minutes, all the way to once every 24 hours.

Visit www.twitterfeed.com for more information.

Ping.fm and Hellotxt

These services allow you to post to dozens of Social Media websites, in addition to the aforementioned sites, you can also publish to other popular websites like Tumblr, Friendfeed, Plurk, Multiply and various others.

Unfortunately both seem to have some technical errors and cannot automate the updates in the way they’re supposed to.  Ping.fm for example, does not automatically aggregate the RSS Feeds of certain blogs and therefore the URL you wish to share must be manually copied, pasted and submitted through the Ping.fm interface.  Apparently the developers are working on a solution but there is no estimate for when this issue will be resolved.

Still, these websites can drastically reduce your workload and are worth a look.

Visit https://ping.fm and https://hellotxt.com for more information.

OnlyWire

This is a commercial service which enables you to send blog updates to dozens of Social Media websites.  The difference with this service is OnlyWire employs staff to oversee the submissions which makes error detection more reliable. It also means they can solve CAPTCHAs, I.e. the letters and numbers you must enter register new accounts.  Therefore you can also submit to websites like StumbleUpon and Reddit which use CAPTCHAs to prevent SPAM.

Being a commercial service OnlyWire comes at a price and has paid plans to cater for Professional and Enterprise solutions.  However, if you’d like free trial, you may make 300 submissions before having to migrate to a plan.

OnlyWire is by far the most comprehensive and reliable solution although it does come at a price.

Check out https://onlywire.com/ for more details.

Warning!

It’s great when you get this kind of automation setup, but there are some pitfalls to watch for.

1. Make sure you don’t have multiple automated services sharing your blog permalinks simultaneously.  Otherwise you’ll bombard your followers with the same link and this may cause them to unfollow you.
2. Sometimes the services go offline for maintenance, or in the case of the free services, the developers decide to discontinue support.  In the case of OnlyWire, you will be informed via Email if there is any downtime.
3. Don’t go overboard posting the same URL.  If you oversaturate the Internet with too many links to the same webpage in a short period of time, it may trigger a Search Engine’s spam filter and result in a penalty for your website.  Search Engine prefer to see back links added gradually and not hundreds at once.

Never Fear!

If you’re unsure how to setup an automated service we can take care of it for you.  It can be a bit of work if you want to submit to 20 or so different websites.  Just contact us on the form below and let us know your requirements. We love to help!