While authors blog for various reasons, one of the most common factors of blogging is the desire to get the word out.
One way to increase your blogging audience is to publish the articles you write on your blog to your Facebook fan page(s) or personal page.
Let me share with you one of the ways you can publish your WordPress blog articles to Facebook without the need for a WordPress plugin, or setting up a Facebook application. In a future blog article, I will cover If This Then That as another alternative to publishing your blog articles on Facebook.
RSS Graffiti makes it easy to share your blog posts, Twitter updates, YouTube videos and other social activity with your friends and fans on Facebook. You can use RSS Graffiti with any website or social application that has an RSS/Atom feed.
To add the RSS Graffiti application to Facebook, browse https://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/
You can easily add various sources to publish to your Facebook fan pages or your personal Facebook page.
Below is a live, as of March 29, 2012, example of two publishing plans — one for our company Facebook fan page, and the other for my personal Facebook page. You are allowed to set up a number of feed sources; the RSS Graffiti 2.0 beta includes the ability to pull posts from twitter users as well as twitter hash tags.
[captionpix imgsrc=”http://www.dynamicnet.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/rss-graffiti-2-beta-overview-page.png” captiontext=”RSS Graffiti 2.0 Beta overview page” imgalt=”RSS Graffiti 2.0 Beta overview page” width=”500″ align=”center” margintop=”15″ marginbottom=”15″ theme=”photo”]
First, if you don’t have one already, create a publishing plan.
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Next, adjust your target by left clicking on the target link.
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You can chose to target a specific fan page, or your personal page; and whether you are posting on behalf of a specific fan page or from your personal page.
You can decide from three different methods of posting from Standard (the default) to Compact to Status Updates (with or without a link). As you select each one, the preview on the bottom changes to reflect what a post might look like when published. Personally, I find the “Standard” (default) works best.
Once you have your target set up, then add a source.
[captionpix imgsrc=”http://www.dynamicnet.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/rss-graffiti-2-beta-source-add-new-source.png” captiontext=”RSS graffiti 2.0 Beta — add new source” imgalt=”RSS graffiti 2.0 Beta — add new source” width=”473″ align=”center” margintop=”15″ marginbottom=”15″ theme=”photo”]
Here is an example of a fully set up source for publishing our WordPress blog to our Facebook fan page:
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Did you catch how the feed URL of http://www.dynamicnet.net/feed/ can be transformed to http://www.dynamicnet.net/blog/ ?
Where I find this feature most useful is if you have a feed URL like http://feeds.feedburner.com/illbehonest-global-site-updates and you would rather direct visitors who click on the source URL (web page) to go to http://www.youtube.com/user/illbehonest instead.
In the source settings advanced tab, you can adjust the formatting of the message, as well as pick the start date for publishing (right now the label is cut off date; but the actual functionality is start date).
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Try experimenting with different formatting; I’ve found the “Same as the Item’s Title” to be helpful; you might have a different experience.
Once you have a source to target set up, and turned on, try it out by creating some blog articles — live or test ones you later delete.
If you are one of our managed hosting customers, and have questions about connecting your WordPress blog you host with us to one of your Facebook fan pages or your personal Facebook page, contact our customer support department for free help.