Often I got all warm and fuzzy about the social media sharing app Buffer.
And with good reason — in my humble opinion, it is the best of its kind. Not only does it offer awesome functionality, but it is constantly being developed and improved upon. And the guys at Buffer love WordPress. They purchased the popular social sharing plugin Digg Digg and have been updating it regularly ever since.
But they’re not the only ones at it. A chap called Tim Carr has gone to the trouble of developing a free WordPress plugin that goes a long way towards integrating Buffer with WordPress.
Let’s take a closer look!
Buffer has managed to circumvent that by offering up a tool that benefits the user (in terms of allowing them to publish social media updates at optimum times) and the follower (as the updates are presented to them at optimum times). WP to Buffer has sought to capitalize upon that by offering a means of automating the ‘buffering’ of new WordPress posts.
The concept is simple — you finish a post, hit publish, and WP to Buffer pushes the post to your Buffer account, where it will be published at the optimum time:
As you can see from the above screenshot, you can also set WP to Buffer to re-buffer a post whenever you update it.
The authentication process is pretty simple — whilst you do have to set up an app within Buffer (this will be familiar if you’ve ever connected Facebook to your WordPress site), the plugin offers all the instructions you need.
Once connected, WP to Buffer’s full functionality will be revealed. The first thing you will want to make note of is the different fields you can display in your tweets:
As you can see, just about every piece of information you would want to include is made available. You can also add any custom text as you see fit.
Simple! I publish my post, and its promotion via Twitter is taken care of for me.
Download WP to Buffer here.
And with good reason — in my humble opinion, it is the best of its kind. Not only does it offer awesome functionality, but it is constantly being developed and improved upon. And the guys at Buffer love WordPress. They purchased the popular social sharing plugin Digg Digg and have been updating it regularly ever since.
But they’re not the only ones at it. A chap called Tim Carr has gone to the trouble of developing a free WordPress plugin that goes a long way towards integrating Buffer with WordPress.
Let’s take a closer look!
WP to Buffer
There’s nothing quite like automation — the concept of setting something up once, and it doing its job perpetually with no further input required. You have to be careful with automation when it comes to social media though, as it can come across as a bit ‘lifeless’ or even spammy.Buffer has managed to circumvent that by offering up a tool that benefits the user (in terms of allowing them to publish social media updates at optimum times) and the follower (as the updates are presented to them at optimum times). WP to Buffer has sought to capitalize upon that by offering a means of automating the ‘buffering’ of new WordPress posts.
The concept is simple — you finish a post, hit publish, and WP to Buffer pushes the post to your Buffer account, where it will be published at the optimum time:
As you can see from the above screenshot, you can also set WP to Buffer to re-buffer a post whenever you update it.
Settings
The plugin’s settings screen is unnecessarily accessible via its own sidebar menu (dear plugin developers — single page settings screens do not deserve their own top-level menu).The authentication process is pretty simple — whilst you do have to set up an app within Buffer (this will be familiar if you’ve ever connected Facebook to your WordPress site), the plugin offers all the instructions you need.
Once connected, WP to Buffer’s full functionality will be revealed. The first thing you will want to make note of is the different fields you can display in your tweets:
As you can see, just about every piece of information you would want to include is made available. You can also add any custom text as you see fit.
Simple! I publish my post, and its promotion via Twitter is taken care of for me.
Potential Improvements
There is a good argument that you should keep a plugin like this as simple as possible, but I do have a few thoughts on how this plugin could be improved:- The ability to create different templates for your different social media accounts
- The ability to buffer a post multiple times, with different messages
- The ability customize the template on a per-post/page basis
Download WP to Buffer here.
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