I am trying to gain some traction for a vegetarian workout blog of mine and part of my efforts goes into social networks. Here is how I automatically post content from my Atom feed, to my Facebook page and to Twitter.
This assumes your website already has a RSS feed.
Posting to Twitter
Automatically posting to Twitter is dead simple with the awesome service IFTTT. It lets you set up triggers for various conditions and which fires actions.
In my case the trigger is “New feed item”, where I enter the feed URL, and the action is “Post a tweet”. Once saved, IFTTT will check the feed every 15 minutes and send a tweet as soon as it sees a new entry.
If you have multiple Twitter accounts you might have to create an IFTTT account for each of them, because IFTTT can only handle a one-to-one relation. Sucks, but you probably will only set this up once and then be done with it.
Posting to Facebook
You could use IFTTT for Facebook as well, but they do not support posting to Facebook pages. Unfortunately, this is a requirement for my use case.
What you often see when searching for a solution to automatically posting to Facebook pages is RSS Grafitti. It is definitely a nice service but I really do not like the way its shared posts are displayed.
Instead I would recommend dlvr.it. This little gem detects new posts from a given feed and automatically shares them to any Facebook page, app or wall you want.
And it does so exactly the way I want them to be displayed; which is as if I would have posted them mnully myself. This respects my og tags as well, so the correct image, title and description text is used.
Automatic posting
Implementing automatic posting to Twitter and Facebook is easy. But when should you use it?
For tobiassjosten.net I do not use automatic posting, because I like being in control of what titles I use for the various channels. A post like “PHP Mentoring” will be “#PHP Mentoring” in Twitter, but “+PHP Mentoring” on Google+.
This blog also caters to a more tech savvy audience, whom can subscribe to a feed with their syndication tool of choice. Hence I do not feel I would do readers a big favor by having my tech posts show up in their Facebook feed.
This is different for Vegout.se, so more channels is warrented and so automatic posting makes sense. Or else posting manually could easily become cumbersome.