Trumblog

Writing a blog post is only half the battle.  Once it’s published you need to spread the word that it’s done and attract an audience.  I do that through RSS and Twitter and together they do a lot of the heavy lifting.  However that leaves my Facebook friends out, unless  of course we are also connected via Twitter.  In theory I could cross post from Twitter to Facebook, but these are two different audiences and I don’t want to bore my Facebook friends with the links to online marketing and social media articles that my tweet stream is filled with,  not to mention conference backchannel discussions.  I do however want to let my friends on Facebook know about blog posts that I publish, regardless of the topic.

While there are plenty of options for sending a tweet when a new blog post is published, sending an update to Facebook has not been so easy unless you are channeling your tweets to Facebook as well.  However, Steve Atty‘s new Wordbooker plugin and Facebook application (you need set them both up and grant them permissions to have full functionality) cross posting is both simple and has all sorts of great benefits.

Cross Posting Options

Through the settings panel Wordbooker gives you two options for cross posting.  The first is to publish a post, which is the same as sharing your blog post a link on Facebook including the blog post title, excerpt and content image if one exists.  Both the status update and the length of the post excerpt can be easily customized. I love this option and actually wish that more sites and services shared the title excerpt and image, which is so much more engaging than just a link.  This is why it’s the option that I use for sharing my own blog posts on Facebook.

The second option for cross posting is to just post your Facebook  status update with a customizable intro, the blog post title and a link to the post.  I’ve described them as two options, but there is no reason to pick between the two.  You can cross post both ways at once if you like.  There’s also the option to automatically repost the link to Facebook if you update the post 10+ days after you originally posted it.

You think that’s fancy?  Wait there’s more.  You can customize all of those options for any given post and republish any post to Facebook at will.  The plugin also supports posting to multiple Facebook accounts and pages.  Talk about flexibility.

Comment Fetching

All that easy and customizable cross posting to Facebook might have been enough for some people, but Steve Atty didn’t stop there with this plugin.  Just as with any other link that you post to Facebook you are likely to get comments.  You may use a plugin like BackType to aggregate comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, etc. Wordbooker does the same with Facebook.  Wordbooker fetches comments about your link or update on Facebook and adds them to your comments section. Ain’t that sweet?

The Wordbooker WordPress plugin fills a void for extending your blog posts into Facebook and providing plenty of customization and flexibility.  I’d also venture to say that Steve Atty is open to further modification based on the feedback that he’s taken and enhancements that he’s added since launching the plugin just a couple weeks ago.

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