Configuring automatic posting to Facebook or Twitter

From Kentico, you can post messages to Facebook and Twitter directly from the Pages application or the on-site editing interface.

You have the following options how to publish content from within the editing interface to Facebook or Twitter. Each of them is suitable for a different situation.

• To post information about a certain section of the content tree, regardless of the document type, choose Publishing to Facebook or Twitter using a workflow step.
• To post information about documents of one specific document type (e.g., blog post), either manually, or automatically at the time of publishing, choose Publishing to Facebook or Twitter using form controls.

In both these cases, you post to the chosen social media from within the interface where you edit a document. You can use macros in the post, for example, to insert the URL of the document into the post.

Publishing to Facebook or Twitter using a workflow step

You can post messages to social media as part of a document’s workflow process using the Publish to Facebook and Publish to Twitter workflow steps. You can use this approach to automatically publish information about documents in a section of your site’s content.

1. Connect Kentico to the social media and Add a social media account.

2. Edit the social media account that you want to publish to.

3. Enable the Default check box and save the social media account.

   • The Default check box designates the account as the account that advanced workflow should use. You can have only one default account per one social media.

4. Create an advanced workflow with the Publish to Facebook or Publish to Twitter step.

   

5.  Set the Text of the message which will be automatically posted to Facebook/Twitter in the Workflow step properties. You can use macros in the message.

   • For example, Check out our new blog post at www.example.com{% GetDocumentURL() %}. The resulting URL could then look like this: www.example.com/blog/my-latest-blog-post.aspx

6. Create a document using this defined workflow.

When advancing over the Publish to Facebook/Publish to Twitter step in the workflow, the predefined message will be automatically posted. The message will appear in Kentico in the Facebook or Twitter application.

Publishing to Facebook or Twitter using form controls

By adding the Facebook auto post and Twitter auto post form controls to a document type, you can enable editors to post messages to social media from the document editing interface.

1. Connect Kentico to the social media and Add a social media account.
2. Open the Document types application.
3. Edit () the chosen document type.
4. On the Fields tab, click New field.
5. Set up the following properties:
   • Field name
   • Field type: Long text
   • Field caption
   • Form control: Facebook auto post or Twitter auto post
6. Click Save.

When you edit a document of the modified type in the Pages application, a new field appears on the Form tab. The field allows editors to compose a message to be posted on social media.

When the editor saves the document, the system publishes their post on the chosen social media account (a Facebook page or Twitter channel). If the editor sets the Publishing time to a future time, the system schedules the publishing of the post to the entered time. Users can view both scheduled and published posts in Kentico in the Facebook or Twitter application.