Creating and setting up a blog in today’s world is just a cinch. Hundreds of free services are available for us to avail that guides us to hop on the blogging bandwagon. The ones that are most popularly used include Blogger, Medium, and WordPress. The most preferred among these three is the WordPress. Three main features that I like the most about WordPress are that it is pretty easy to set-up, offers stability and security with frequent updates and various themes and customization options. The advantage of the use of its plugins sets WordPress apart. WordPress has been making our lives so much easier with its plugins when it comes to running a website. This review talks about one such plugin named Blog2Social which is a freemium plugin for WordPress.
Sharing your work over social media gets cumbersome at times and is in actual a time-consuming process. To get a solution for this, people at Adenion have created an amazing and simple plug-in for bloggers.
Blogging doesn’t include writing only. It is about everything from modifying/creating images to marketing the work online. There are tons of blogs on the internet, and a blogger has got to put in extra efforts to make their blog visible to a good range of audience. Hence, good marketing of your blog is an essential aspect of blogging. With Blog2Social, it has become much easier and simpler.
About Blog2Social
Over the time, we have seen social networking sites becoming one of the major sources of traffic to the websites. With different rules being made for these sites, it gets difficult to share one’s work. For example, Hashtags are quite an essential part of posts on Twitter but aren’t much important for other websites. Hence, managing the content to be shared and scheduled at the same time becomes a task in itself.
Blog2Social is a plugin for WordPress that gives us the provision to automatically share our blog posts on our social media profiles, pages, and groups, absolutely scheduled and fully customized for each and every network. One can add individual comments and hashtags for each network to customize their posts. There is another provision of scheduling the posts for the best times for posting on each network. This plugin is free to start, and its features are quite promising to make it the best social media auto-post plugin for 2017.
This plugin is a mixture of the powers of features like Auto Posting, post scheduling and customizing the features, in turn, allowing the users to perform almost everything efficiently for marketing. As soon as a post is published over WordPress, Blog2Social WordPress plugin starts doing its work and shares the post across the mentioned social media accounts either recurring or one-time. One of the best features of the Blog2Social plugin is that it automatically adds @handles or #Hashtags or comments based on the social network that we are sharing on.
Blog2Social Pros
Image selection
Blog2Social selects images from your blog post over WordPress which includes your featured image as well. This is not a problem as long as the images that are selected are the ones you want to share otherwise, in case you wish to share a particular image that you have created for Instagram or Pinterest which is not inside the blog post, you can upload that image from your device or choose from your WordPress Media Library. Several options are available to choose from:
a) Select one from the blog post images.
b) A selected image is chosen to be applied to a single social network.
c) A selected image is chosen to be applied to all the connected social networks.
d) Select and upload one from the WordPress Media Library.
By selecting individual images, you can customize your social sharing for each network and also vary the images in your recurring schedules.
2. Custom Scheduling
Along with tailoring the message for every network, one can choose the number of times they want the post to be shared using the custom scheduling options:
a) Share Now – post gets immediately shared but for once.
b) Schedule Once – post gets shared at the scheduled time but for once.
c) Schedule Post Recurrently – post gets shared at the various scheduled time but for more than once.
3. Custom Sharing
The Custom Sharing screen has individual panels for each of One’s selected social networks. Hence, instead of flooding all social networks with the same content, one can alter the message accordingly. For example, on one side hashtags work fine on Twitter and Instagram but don’t on Facebook and LinkedIn. Another case is of Facebook and Google Plus. Facebook users prefer short messages, and Google Plus users engage better with longer posts.
4. Auto-Posting
Blog2Social provides you the provision to automatically post your latest blog posts immediately to the social networks you have selected or lets you create a schedule to publish the new blog post. A small panel is made available to the blogger on their WordPress editor on the right side of the blog which has the work to let the blogger make their selections.
SELECT PROFILE – Select the profiles that you wish to share your blog post on. This could be a single network or a group of networks depending on the configuration you do.
SHARE IMMEDIATELY OR SCHEDULE SHARING OF THE MEDIA POSTS – Two options are available:-
a) Immediate sharing of the posts as soon as they are published.
b) A scheduler gets opened where you can
– Pick your date and time manually.
– If you check the box, it will publish the post at your saved time settings.
– If no preferences have been saved, the plugin will use the built-in Best Time Scheduler.
That small selection box provides with so many choices to choose from. This feature is a definite time-saver. Even if you didn’t create a schedule for posting, the predefined best times can be used in the plugin.
Free + Premium
You can test Blog2Social Premium for 30 days free of charge. Features available in the Freemium period are:
- Automatic sharing + Scheduling
- Customized posts + Best Time Scheduler
- Social media profiles + Social media pages and groups
- Reporting + Multiple sharing profiles
- Facebook pages + Multiple accounts per network
Conclusion
Blog2Social is a new WordPress plugin. It is continually adding more and more functionalities to make scheduling posts and marketing easy for the bloggers and as painless as possible. If you want your posts to share automatically over your networks, WordPress Blog2Social plugin is probably the best option.
