Small Business Blog

How To Post Automatic Updates to LinkedIn From Your Joomla Site

Small business owners and entrepreneurs often don’t have the time to delve into establishing themselves in the social media realm. Some have ignored Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn altogether, while others have lonely profile pages that are starved for content and followers. Are you feeling that dilemma? If you are, and you have a Joomla-based Web site, we have a solution.

The solution is to set your Joomla site to post status updates automatically to your Twitter, Facebook profile, Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, MySpace page, and a variety of other social media sites. Once you set this up, an update (that includes a link back to your site) would be triggered every time you create or save content on your Web site. So when you publish a coupon on your site, or you announce the hiring of a new employee, or you revamp the description of your services on your site, your Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn connections will get the news — automatically. And that means you can participate in social media marketing with almost no effort at all.

Method 1.

This first method involves installing a Ping.fm plug-in, which you can find here.  Please note that this plug-in doesn’t work for everyone; in this case, you can use the slightly more complicated Method 2 that I’ve described below.

Set up your Ping.fm account. The first step of Method 1 is to set up a free Ping.fm account. Follow the instructions within Ping.fm to add all of your networks to your account. Once you have done this, any post you publish to Ping.fm will automatically get distributed out to the social networks you have identified.

Download and install the plug-in. Now you are ready to install the aforementioned plug-in to your site. Access the plug-in from the link above, and then download the zip file and save it to your hard drive. From the back-end of your site, use the installer within the Extension Manager. Next, go to your Plug-in Manager to set your configuration settings. Make sure you are logged into your Ping.fm account, and use the link provided in the configuration page to obtain an API key from Ping.fm. From there, you simply enable the plug-in. Test the plug-in by resaving an article on your site.

Method 2.

This method also requires you to have a Ping.fm account. In this set-up, you will use a combination of Twitter, Twitter Status and Twitter Feed to send automatic updates to Ping.fm; Ping.fm will then distribute those updates to your other social media accounts.

Set up your Ping.fm account. Start by setting up your free Ping.fm account. Follow the instructions within Ping.fm to add all of your networks, except Twitter, to your account. Again, do not add Twitter!

Download Twitter Status. Visit here and download the Twitter Status component. This component is not free, but you can obtain it for as little as $9.99. It will be well worth it in the time it saves you. Save a copy of the component to your hard drive.

Install and Configure Twitter Status. Use the installer in Extension Manager to upload and install the component to your site. Navigate your browser to the configuration page from the component menu. You will set your preferences regarding when the component will send tweets to your Twitter account. You will also input your Twitter account name and password.

Obtain and Configure a Twitter Feed Account. Your next step will be to set up a free Twitter Feed account. Visit TwitterFeed.com and click “sign up.” When you sign up, TwitterFeed automatically directs you to the page where you create a new feed. You will see a box entitled Feed Name and another entitled RSS Feed URL. Name the feed whatever you like. Then, navigate to Twitter.com, log into your account and click on profile. Scroll down until you see a link entitled “RSS Feed of [your account name]‘s tweets” in the right column. Click on that link and then copy the URL of that page. It should be something like this: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/12345679.rss Go back to Twitter Feed and paste that URL into the RSS Feed URL box. You can click on “Advanced Settings” to indicate how often you’d like the feed to update.

On page 2 of the configuration settings, you will select Ping.fm. Then, input your Ping.fm API key; you can obtain this by navigating to ping.fm/key when you are logged into your account. Select “status” from the Method drop-down. Then, save your settings and you are all set.

Now, whenever you create new content or update old content on your Web site, Twitter Status will send the update straight to your Twitter account. From there, TwitterFeed sends the same post to Ping.fm, which then distributes it to all of your social media networks. How that for multi-tasking??