Social Media is a great way to drive traffic to your website, but managing each social network for your website can be a time consuming job. Going in to each account and manually sharing the latest posts can take more time than actually writing and preparing the new content. Most of modern-day websites are built on WordPress.

Most of us know that WordPress comes with a lot of plugins that help us automate social sharing, but using these plugins mean adding more scripts and functions to your WordPress that could potentially increase the site loading time.

Thanks to many online tools, we can actually automate our social accounts and save ourselves from manually updating them. Why should you automate your social media accounts using these techniques? Well, the benefits of using these techniques are plentiful. Some of these benefits are:

Lesser the plugins on your website, lesser the server resources utilized. This means your website will have better page load times.

Lesser update notifications means little time invested in plugin maintenance.

Minimal time is spent on managing social media accounts.

More social signals can help you rank better organically in SERPs.

These tools provide analytics, so you know which posts are getting viral.

Impressed? Well, you will be once you implement one of these techniques on your website. So, here are the three ways to automate the social sharing of your WordPress powered websites. I personally use the first method.

Method 1: Using IFTTT, Buffer, and Feedly

My recommended method for automating social sharing is by using three free web services: IFTTT, Buffer, and Feedly.

IFTTT is an amazing service that allows us to connect various accounts and web applications in order to automate them. I use IFTTT to automate a lot of tasks and generate reports and alerts. I strongly recommend it and I think it is the best FREE thing to use.

Buffer is an amazing web application that allows you to schedule posts to share on specific times. The basic version is free to use with all the popular social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Feedly is a feed aggregator software that collects RSS feeds of resources. The best thing about Feedly is that its design is very simple and works at very high speeds.

In order to automate your social media, you need to first get signed up with Feedly, Buffer, and IFTTT. Then, add the feed of your WordPress site to Feedly by using the search bar present on the top-right side. On WordPress powered websites, a default RSS feed can be found at www.yourdomain.com/feed.

Create a new collection and click Follow.

Then, head over to Buffer and login to connect the social platforms and pages that you want configure. For adding multiple accounts, you may need to buy “The Awesome Plan”.

Now, you can connect Feedly and Buffer through IFTTT using this tutorial: If Feedly Then Add to Buffer. Verify your accounts and select the Feedly category that you want to automate. That’s it! You are all good to go.

Now, whenever a new post is found in your Website category of Feedly, your post will be added to Buffer. Last thing you need to define is how many times a day you want to share posts automatically via Buffer.

Method 2: Using TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed is a straightforward 3-step web service that allows you to add blog feeds and auto publish the posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and App.net.

First, add the feed and title of your blog feed. Then, go to Advance Settings where you can define the update frequency, post content, post sorting, post prefix, and post suffix.

Once you are done, you need to select your desired social media networks for sharing posts.

Method 3: HootSuite

HootSuite has been around for a long time. It is a very powerful social media management tool where scheduling posts for sharing on multiple social accounts is very easy. It supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress, and mixi.

First, signup for a free account at Hootsuite.com and add your preferred social media accounts.

Next, navigate to Publisher and add the RSS feed of your blog.

Finally, you need to add AutoSchedule to your posts.

HootSuite is easy to configure and you can schedule up to 10 posts at a time in a single account. I would suggest that you use different HootSuite accounts for different WordPress websites.

Thoughts

I hope you will find these techniques useful. If you know about more tricks and techniques to automate social media posting without plugins, do share them in the comments section below.