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How to Share New WordPress Posts on Twitter – Automatically & for Free
Searching for a solution to automatically share new WordPress posts on Twitter?
Sharing your content on Twitter is a great way to get some eyeballs on it, but it’s a hassle to have to manually tweet every time you publish something new.
Thankfully, there are some great tools that can automate the process for you so that you can get the benefits of sharing on Twitter with none of the work.
In this post, we’ll show you step-by-step how to start automatically sharing new posts to Twitter for free and with zero technical knowledge required. Best of all, the method that we’ll show you doesn’t require you to create a Twitter app, which makes it really easy to get started.
Ready to begin? Here’s how it works…
How to Automatically Share New WordPress Posts on Twitter
To automatically share your WordPress content on Twitter, you can use the free version of the Uncanny Automator plugin.
Uncanny Automator lets you create your own custom “recipes” to automate stuff on your WordPress site. You can use it to automate a lot of different things, but the automation that we’re focused on in this post is the ability to automatically share new content on Twitter.
You’ll be able to create a “trigger” to tell Uncanny Automator when to share content on Twitter, like sharing all new blog posts or only posts in a certain category:
Then, you can set up an “action” to tell Uncanny Automator to share that content on Twitter. You’ll also be able to use dynamic templates to customize your tweets with each post’s information, like inserting the actual title of a post and its URL:
The neat thing is that Uncanny Automator will work with any WordPress content, including custom post types or content from other plugins.
So, in addition to sharing blog posts, you could also share new WooCommerce products, new events (if you’re using an event plugin), new directory listings (if you’re using a directory plugin), new forum threads (if using a forum plugin), etc.
Here’s how it works!
1. Install the Uncanny Automator Plugin
Uncanny Automator is available for free at WordPress.org. There’s also a premium version that adds tons of cool features, but you only need the free version to share content on Twitter.
Head to Plugins → Add New and install the plugin. Then, continue on to set up your first Twitter automation.
2. Connect Your Twitter Account
Once you’ve installed Uncanny Automator, the next step is to connect the Twitter account to which you want to share your posts. You can connect any Twitter account – as long as you have the username and password, of course!
To connect your account, head to Automator → Settings → Twitter. Then, click the green Connect an account button:
This will send you to Twitter to grant Uncanny Automator access to your account to share tweets. If you aren’t already logged in to Twitter, you’ll first need to log in to your Twitter account.
Click the Authorize app button to continue:
Then, you should be taken back to the Uncanny Automator settings and you should see a success message:
Now, you’re ready to set up your Tweet automation…
3. Create Your Recipe Trigger
When you want to automate something with Uncanny Automator, you create a “recipe”. A recipe has two parts:
- Trigger – this is the condition under which you want to do “something”. In this case, the trigger is “Publishing a new post”.
- Action – this is the “something” that you want to do when the trigger happens. In this case, “Posting a tweet”.
To get started, you’ll want to create a new recipe and configure the trigger.
To do this, go to Automator → Add New. In the Select a recipe type prompt that appears, choose Logged-in:
Then, choose WordPress under Select an integration:
You’ll see a list of triggers. Use the search box to search for “publish” and then choose the trigger named “A user publishes a type of post…”
Now, you can choose exactly what content you want to share on Twitter. If you want to share all your blog posts, choose Post in the Post type drop-down and then hit Save:
If you only want to share certain types of posts, you can also change the Taxonomy drop-down. For example, if you only wanted to share blog posts in the “News” category, you could choose Category under Taxonomy and then News under Taxonomy term:
If needed, you can also create multiple triggers, which gives you a lot of flexibility. For example, you could create another trigger for a different category of blog posts.
4. Create Your Recipe Action
Once you’ve set up your trigger(s) to tell Uncanny Automator what content you want to share on Twitter, the next step is to set up the “action” (posting to Twitter).
In the Actions box, click the Add action button. Then, choose Twitter in the list of options:
In the Select an action box, choose the “Post a status to Twitter” result:
Now, you’ll see a text box that lets you enter the message that you want to share to Twitter.
You can enter static text in the message that will be the same for all the posts that you share. Then, to dynamically add text (like the title of a blog post and its URL), you can use “tokens”.
To access the list of tokens, click on the asterisk next to the text box. Then, you can use the search box to search for specific tokens. For a tweet, you’ll probably want to add at least:
- Post title
- Post URL
You can also explore the other tokens to see if you find something useful. For example, for a multi-author blog, you might want to also include the author’s name, which you can do by adding that token.
When you’re finished, the message might look something like below – you can see how it’s a mix of static text and dynamic tokens:
Let’s look at an example:
If you published a post with the details below and the message from the screenshot above…
- Post title: Here’s Why the Philadelphia 76ers Are Going to Win the NBA Championship
- Post URL: https://basketballblog.com/76ers-championship
…then the full tweet would read:
New Post: Here’s Why the Philadelphia 76ers Are Going to Win the NBA Championship — Read it at: https://basketballblog.com/76ers-championship
Make sure to click Save when you’re finished and then you’re almost done.
5. Publish Your Recipe
To make your recipe live and start automatically sharing content, use the toggle in the Recipe box in the sidebar to change it from Draft to Live:
And that’s it! When you publish new content that meets your trigger rule(s), Uncanny Automator will automatically share it to Twitter right away following your template:
Uncanny Automator also includes a logging feature so that you can keep track of all your shared content. Head to Automator → Action log and you can see all the posts that Uncanny Automator has automatically shared for you:
You can also create multiple recipes if needed – just repeat steps 3-5. For example, by creating separate recipes, you could use a different message depending on a post’s category or the type of content.
Other WordPress Plugins to Automatically Share WordPress Posts on Twitter
You can also find several other plugins to help you automatically share WordPress posts on Twitter. These plugins work fine, but there are a couple of limitations to keep in mind:
- You’ll need to create a Twitter app before you can start sharing content, which adds some complexity to the setup process, especially if you’re not a technical person.
- These plugins only work for Twitter. You can’t benefit from other types of automations like Uncanny Automator allows.
WP to Twitter
WP to Twitter is a popular option at WordPress.org, where it’s active on 40,000+ sites with a 3.9-star rating on 59+ reviews.
With the free version, you can automatically share new posts on Twitter, including setting up your own custom templates and using post tags as hashtags.
If you upgrade to the premium version for $49+, you’ll get access to other features like letting authors connect their own Twitter accounts and time-delaying your automatic tweets.
WP Twitter Auto Publish
WP Twitter Auto Publish is another popular option at WordPress.org. Once you set up your Twitter app, you can have it share simple text messages or text messages with images.
You get a few dynamic placeholders for details like a post’s title, permalink, and author. And you’ll also get some other useful features like category and custom post type filtering to control what content to share.
Start Automating Twitter Sharing Today
If you want a simple yet customizable way to automatically share WordPress content on Twitter, Uncanny Automator might just be your new best friend.
You can connect your Twitter account with just a few clicks – no need to create an app. Then, you can set up your own custom sharing configurations using recipes – all for free!
Finally, Uncanny Automator can do a lot more than sharing content on Twitter. To see what else it can do and get some more ideas for automating your WordPress site, check out all the triggers, actions, and integrations by clicking here.
Do you still have any questions about how to automatically share WordPress posts on Twitter? Let us know in the comments!
I would like to turn automatically the tags of my WordPress post in to hashtags on twitter. For example if on a post i ‘ll write tags as like “news”, “covid-19” I would like when it will be posted on twitter to take those tags and turn it in to #new, #covid-19.
Is this possible? What i have to do?
That’s an interesting idea, thanks for the feedback! It’s not currently supported but we can take a look at it for a future release.