Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, etc… you name it. There are plenty of tools out there to facilitate a two-way communication with your stakeholders. Each of these tools have different purposes: connecting with your fans, sharing ideas about your product, seeking your customers’ opinions, meeting new people… but the same aim: building a community.
Individuals and businesses work really hard to build a strong and vibrant community for a very simple reason- social media is based on interactions. As a customer, I like the idea of giving my opinion/suggestions/feedback on what I purchase. As a business owner, I love to engage a conversation with users – exchanging ideas on how to improve my product. Both side benefits from the conversation.
‘Managing’ the use of these different tools require a lot of time. Being an entrepreneur generally means having more items in your to-do list than you can ever tackle in your lifetime! Having taken the lead on PocketSmith social media’s strategy, I found myself getting more involved in communicating with our community via Twitter & Facebook mainly. While Jason kickstarted our PocketSmith Twitter account back in October 2008, I recently set up our Facebook Page. In addition to our blog in which the three of us contribute to, that takes up quite a bit of our time.
A solution to this consists of integrating relevant social media tools with the benefits of creating synergies and saving time. In our case, it makes sense to create ‘links’ or ‘bridges’ between Facebook / Twitter / Blog (WordPress). These three mediums have their own audience but share the same common objective – to open a communication door between PocketSmith and its stakeholders.
Since I met Ryan Hellyer from PixoPoint, we have been bouncing ideas around technical solutions available to implement a ’smart’ social media integration for PocketSmith. Ryan is a WordPress developer specialising in theme and plugin development and automated code generation. He is going to explain how he has approached this challenge.
Report by Ryan Hellyer
The following is a report by Ryan Hellyer from PixoPoint.com on the technical aspects of social media integration between WordPress, Twitter and FaceBook.
Methods of integrating social media networks
WordPress <-> Twitter integration
The creation of WordPress veteran Alex King, the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress is by far the most popular solution for WordPress / Twitter integration. This terrific WordPress plugin as described by the author “creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account”. After installing the plugin in your WordPress powered site you can set your Twitter account information into the plugins settings page. By changing the various settings you can set your WordPress installation to create new tweets every time you post a new blog post and/or create new blog posts very time you tweet. Alternatively you can create a digest of your daily or weekly tweets.
WordPress -> FaceBook
There are a plethora of FaceBook applications with the sole purpose of grabbing an RSS feed and inserting it into your FaceBook profile. We chose to use the RSS Graffiti application we use to insert the title for the post, a short excerpt, the date and a small thumbnail image grabbed from the post itself (if one exists).
Another option includes using the WordBook WordPress plugin, but it does not give the same flexibility in the way it works, in particular it does not allowing posting on FaceBook pages.
FaceBook -> WordPress
There are two approaches to integrating your FaceBook activity into your WordPress powered site, the hard way, and the easy way. The easy way is provided by FaceBook as a simple piece of code you can add into your posts, theme or a widget. For PocketSmith.com we used the easy approach which you can see the in the blogs sidebar. The hard way is to use XFMBL after setting up FaceBook Connect on your site. We decided not to use this approach as the integration method provided by FaceBook was perfect for our particular use case.
Twitter <-> FaceBook
FaceBook has provided a simple way to allow users to integrate their FaceBook posts with Twitter and the same method use for integrating WordPress into your FaceBook wall via the RSS Graffiti application can be used to integrate your Twitter updates into your FaceBook wall. For PocketSmith.com we have chosen not to perform this integration as it would result in too many updates being posted on the PocketSmith FaceBook page and potential double posting of the same information. This type of integration can also be very annoying for those following you on both Twitter and FaceBook as they will see the same messages twice.
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