This is a follow-up to last week’s post about linking WordPress to twitter.
I tried the WordTwit plugin, which I had high hopes for because it was written by the same people who wrote wptouch, a very useful plugin for creating mobile device friendly front ends for WordPress. However, when I tried creating blog posts I got errors from Twitter. When you want to auto-post anything to Twitter you need the register the application that does it with Twitter. That’s a way in which they try to cut down on spam. The errors I was getting told me that my authorization to auto-post was out of date or invalid. I tried various ways to recreate it, but with no luck, so I have to assume that Twitter has blacklisted the IP address of this blog, and that no auto-Tweeting will be possible. It is quite likely that the same will be true of every other blog on which I used the Twitter Tools plugin.
I don’t think there will be much point in complaining to Twitter. Like Amazon and PayPal they have grown way to fast and simply don’t have the resources to care about individuals.
Someone on Twitter recommended that I try Twitterfeed, which is a service that claims to auto-tweet your blog posts for you. However, yesterday my friend Anne Lyle said that it had stopped working for her. I’m a bit concerned that this is more evidence of Twitter clamping down on anyone who auto-posts. Does anyone else have any experience of Twitterfeed? Is it still working for some people?
Meanwhile HootSuite continues to work fine. The only problem is that I have to post manually. I can live with that for now, especially because it has other advantages. It is better at creating Facebook posts (to the extent that I have disabled the Twitter app in Facebook and now use HootSuite to post to my presence there). Also it can post to Google+, so I have created a Google+ page for Wizard’s Tower. I may also create a page for myself, if I can figure out whether Google will permit that (the documentation for Google+ is amongst the worst I have ever seen for an online service).
We’ll see how all of this goes. And I’ll try to report back regularly in the expectation that my experience will be of use to other small businesses.
Twitterfeed works for me and has for about a year, but there can be a bit of a lag in it posting to Twitter sometimes. And I use it maybe once a week at most so no idea if there’s any problems with posts that go up in quick succession.
Thanks. I may get Kevin to try it out for the Hugos as it is likely to be simpler for him than HootSuite.
Hi Cheryl,
Not sure if it will do what you are after, but I use “WP to Twitter” to post a tweet with a link to my post. I also use “selective tweets” to then post a Facebook link to the WordPress entry by adding #fb to the tweet.
This works okay for me as I don’t tweet or share every blog post, but it may not be what you are looking for.
Hope it helps,
David
Cheryl, I’ve used Twitterfeed for about four years now and swear by it. It will also post to Facebook although it’s not as good at that: it tends to select the wrong picture, for instance. It’s also a one-stop solution if you run multiple blogs.