There are various tutorials on how to connect your WordPress blog with social media, so that a blog post is automatically posted in your facebook, google plus, etc… accounts. But what happens if you want to do the opposite? That is, whenever you write something in facebook or other social platforms, these posts display themselves automatically to your wordpress blog? Again! Various plugins available, nothing new here…
The reason for this post was a special requrest of a client of mine. She wanted to show in a widget area a list of the most recent posts from these 3 social platforms (fb, twitter and google plus). The number of posts shown should always be 5 (the most recent ones) regardless from the source. So if the most recent posts all came from facebook, then in the widget area we will show only facebook posts. If among these 5, we have 2 facebook posts, 2 google plus posts and one twitter post, then respectively we will show these posts accordingly.
WordPress comes by default with a show most recent posts widget that can also limit the number of posts (title of posts) shown, so this is the one we will use. Now we must find a way to import the posts from the social media and convert them to wordpress posts. In this way, the widget will be able to always show the most recent posts regardless from their source as they will have been converted to wordpress posts…
How to do that? The plugin FeedWordPress is our friend. What does it do? It reads rss feeds and converts the feeds to posts. There is an option to link the created posts to their original source (the corresponding social media platform in our case) or to keep them purely as wordpress posts. Other optios such as automatic update of the imported posts and other nice things are also available (the scope of this article is not FeedWordPress plugin).
So, now what remains is to find the rss url for each of the social media accounts…
RSS for Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?id=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&format=rss20
Replaxe your id with the id of your facebook page.
RSS for Twitter
http://blog.fogcat.co.uk/2013/01/17/creating-an-rss-feed-for-your-twitter-home-page/
Use this link, and follow the guidelines. You will need ftp access to your site to upload the necessary files and it is not so straightforward as with fetching rss for facebook, but it is a very stable system and worth your time. There are other sites such as http://twitrss.me/ but for some reason FeedWordPress site doesn’t like the resulting feed and displays errors :S.
RSS for Google +
Not so straightforward as well (again the FeedWordPress plugin is very picky with the rss feed it is going to use…). What I did for Google+ was first to create an rss feed with Magenta River. It has a totally free plan which you can use. Unfortunately, the rss feed it produces doesn’t work with the plugin in wordpress. The solution is to take the resulting rss url that Magenta River creates and use it to create a new rss feed with Google Feedburner. Use the rss url of Magenta with Google Feedburner and you are set. For Google + there is also this one http://gplusrss.com/ but my experience with it wasn’t the best. The resulting rss was working for one day and then it was throwing errors. As I am writing this article their site is down so I don’t know… if you want to try it go for it (the resulting rss feed url from it was working directly without any conversions, but it stopped for me…). Maybe you have more luck or they upgraded their system.
The final step of course is to use the final rss urls for each social platform with the FeedWordPress plugin. While I was searching for the correct way to create rss feeds for the social platforms I found out that 2-3 years back it was far easier to get an rss from facebook, google+ etc.. It seems like that the trend is to keep the visitors within their own platforms and make it difficult to export the posts to other platforms (such as wordpress).
RSS for Instagram
http://widget.websta.me/rss/n/username
Use this link, and replace the “username” with your own instagram name. Copy this url and paste it like for RSS for Google+ in the Google Feedburner. The resulting rss url is the one you want to use with FeedWordPress plugin.
