Testing the WordPress plugin Social.

Working on a project that involves using WordPress as the starting point for publication to Twitter and Facebook.

From what I can see, the Holy Grail of WordPress, Facebook and Twitter integration is the plugin Social, offered by MailChimp.

With an active blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page conversations with customers can become a bit fragmented. Like most bloggers, we tweet and post to Facebook when we publish new posts. In a write-once-publish-many-times kind of web, commenting happens outside blogs even more than on the posts themselves. That’s why we worked with the fine folks at Crowd Favorite to create a plugin for WordPress called Social.

You add the plugin to your WordPress blog, and connect Facebook and Twitter. You have the option of re-publishing each new post to these services, and you get to personalize the publication views. According to the documentation, the plugin will pull in the activity from Facebook and Twitter, and aggregate it all on your blog.

That’s great, because I resisted Facebook for years out of the concern that all the activity there is taking place in a gated community. I’m not sure whether WordPress actually imports the Facebook and Twitter posts into WordPress (thereby preserving it), or whether it’s pulled live from the other sources.

I’ve got some work to do in order to understand this, but it’s the best option Ive seen so far.

I am a bit frustrated that the same unrelated image keeps getting picked up by Facebook when I publish this way, but I’ll look into that.