4.2 Promote Content - Please add automatic posting option

[The Old Man]

Please can you consider adding the ability to automatically publish new topics, posts and content via the Promote feature to Twitter, Google+ etc.

At the moment it seems you can only manually cherry pick content, which means retaining and relying on third party other apps like Hootsuite or Feedburner's Socialize option, so that preview summaries of new content (a few words followed by link to the full content on IPS) is streamed 24/7. 

It really seems like a missed functionality if the engine is there to do it.

Many thanks.

[Charles]

The entire point of the new promotes feature is for you to curate the best or most interesting content on your community. Auto-promoting every post basically makes it an RSS feed which not only dilutes the entire point of it but would hurt your standing on social media as they all frown on automated posting. Facebook actually specifically says not to auto-post with pre-populated content in fact.

[Joel R]

Oftentimes the best and most interesting content is specifically admin news, where I highlight new features, important announcements, or critical updates.  For example, I use an IP.Pages database to feed a series of articles to my frontpage that cover both holiday wishes, topical news, community updates, and important webmaster news.  All of those news have been vetted and written by me to appeal to a broad audience of both existing members and guests (since it's designed for my frontpage).  And it makes sense to me that this specific category of Admin news be pushed to all of my social media accounts.  This is why I think it makes sense to allow certain select categories to be auto-promoted. 

Finally, I don't think the biggest benefit of the new social media promote is to curate the best or most interesting news.  That can already be done by manual intervention and I've always been able to copy and link to interesting content.  I think the biggest benefit is to increase efficiency of promotions between our communities and social media accounts, so promotions can be auto-queued, auto-promoted, and auto-pushed.  It helps community managers become more efficient so we queue up a dozen posts in advance and then go on about our merry way, knowing that we have plenty of content to feed into our social media accounts to stimulate activity and interest.  

[KentT]

Being able to automatically Promote content from specific areas or forums would be incredibly valuable.  For example, most forums use some kind of a News & Announcements forum.  Automatically promoting new topics from that specific forum (not all the forums) would be incredibly valuable.

[DesignzShop]

 

On 5/27/2017 at 1:07 PM, Charles said:

Facebook actually specifically says not to auto-post with pre-populated content in fact.

I agree Our Picks is really for picked material. There's just something un-natural about auto - posting in social media imo.

Besides this however FB is very generous with their API/Rates and Limiting as we can see below. Could someone use it as the OP wants above, sure. They're given enough flexibility to accomplish this. At least that should cover most, maybe not all but most needs.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/advanced/rate-limiting/

[KentT]

I use a News and Announcements forum that only Moderators and Admins can post new topics in.  Every topic posted in that specific forum is worthy of promotion.   

I am not suggesting that anyone have the capability to "flood" Facebook or Twitter with every topic or reply posted -- and it seems that if IPS is concerned about that, that a "throttle" could be implemented in the promotion schedule... similar to "flood control" on posting of topics.