How-To Auto Post Google+ From Wordpress

We’ve talked about using social media efficiently for marketing your business, we’ve seen that social media integration is going to be a key trend in 2012 and we’ve been told that it is a mistake not to be on Google Plus. So the next question is how we put this information into action and integrate with Google Plus.

At the moment you can’t auto post to Google Plus

It is unfortunate, but currently Google Plus posts only integrate in one direction. If you post things on Google Plus then these posts can be pushed to Twitter and Facebook. Unfortunately, there is currently no work to push posts from other social media platforms to Google Plus.

This is frustrating for many because they have blogs that auto post links to their new articles on Facebook and Twitter, but the same efficient way of announcing new articles is not yet available on Google Plus.

Why can’t I auto post to Google Plus?

There are various articles on the net that explain that Google haven’t released the Application Program Integration (API) that allows developers to create the plugin to do this. Some of these posts have been updated to announce the release of the API and yet there are still no plugins available. The reason is because Google have released a Google+ API but it is read-only (hence posts only go one way).

I saw a plugin for WordPress called Google Plus Poster. Won’t that work?

We assume you have seen this Google Plus Poster plugin for WordPress. We haven’t purchased it but we did watch the video on YouTube and read the forum and it appears to be a work around that sends you post to Google Plus via a mobile SMS account. We reached this conclusion because it is only available in the US / India (probably because of the SMS Gateway they are using) and because on the YouTube video the example shows ‘SMS’ above the update in Google Plus. It’s great that they’ve found a work around, but if you’re in the UK you’re going to be stuck.

How how do I make use of Google+ efficiently?

If you are already pretty well integrated (e.g. your blog posts automatically get posted to Twitter, Facebook, etc.) then you might consider that updating Google+ with a link to your article manually; because you are already very efficient at managing your social media presence then you may be able to afford the extra seconds it takes to post to Google+. Dare we say it, but this may be more efficient than spending hours looking for a solution to automate the process!

If you haven’t integrated your social media platforms yet, then you could consider using Google+ as your master platform to push updates to Twitter and Facebook. If it’s an option you want to investigate further then checkout How to Connect Google+ to Twitter and Facebook

Will Google+ ever allow me to auto post?

The first release of the Google API was only in September 2011. We would be surprised if they don’t eventually open the API up to allow integration in both directions. It may be that they are developing the API or it may be that they are holding the feature back to encourage people to actually login to Google+. Either way, we hope they will map the necessary API available to developers in the future.