How To Use Google+ As Your Social Media Dashboard To Cross-Post To Facebook, Twitter & More

social media dashboardIf you’re active on several social networks and run your own blog as well, chances are you’re posting a lot of the same content in several different places. To make life a little easier for you, you could simply start to post everything from one place – Google+ – and automatically post that content to several different networks and sites.

Whether it’s your WordPress blog, Twitter profile, or Facebook wall, there are ways to get your Google+ posts to automatically appear so that even if your friends aren’t on Google+ they’ll still be able to keep up with all of your content. It will require a little bit of effort on your part to set up, but once it’s all up and running, you can leave it to work in the background, and you can simply post away from Google+ at your heart’s content.

Of course, a word of warning is in order. The key to any social network is just that – it’s social. You’ll still have to log into Facebook, Twitter or check out the comments on your blog, to interact with your followers and readers.

Post From Google+ To WordPress

If you want to automatically share your Google+ posts on your WordPress blog, you can use the free plugin, Google+Blog. A paid version of the plugin will cost you $10, but the functionality is identical. The only difference is that with the free version, a link to the plugin site will accompany each of your posts.

After installing the plugin, you can access its settings under the WordPress settings menu.

social media dashboard

To set up the plugin, you’ll need your Google+ ID and a Google+ API Key. Your Google+ ID is a long string of numbers and can be found in your profile URL, while you can generate your personal Google+ API Key here. To get started, click on the Create Project button:

social media monitoring

You’ll be presented with a long list of Google-related APIs. Scroll down to Google+ API and turn the setting on.

social media monitoring

You’ll have to accept Google’s API Terms of Service, and the Google+ Platform Terms of Service. This will create your API Project, and you can find your API Key under API Access.

social media monitoring

Once you’ve copied your API Key, go back to your WordPress dashboard, and paste the key into your Google+Blog plugin settings.

Here you can also put in your Google+ ID. You can also decide how many of your past posts will be pulled into your WordPress blog retroactively, and which tags and categories will be associated with your posts. Finally, you can also choose the status of your posts – Pending, Future, Private, Draft or Published.

social media management

From that point on, any Google+ post you share with the social network will be automatically posted to your WordPress blog. The plugin runs every hour to import these posts, but you can manually force an import by updating the plugin options in the settings.

The final product looks exactly the same on your blog as it did on Google+. The title of your WordPress blog post is pulled in from the first sentence of your Google+ post – so be sure to keep the first sentence short and sweet, or even start using titles for your Google+ posts. Images are imported as is, whether you’ve uploaded it directly to Google+ or it’s the automatically generated image that accompanies a link on the social network.  Any comments you receive on Google+ will also appear on your WordPress post.

social media management

Post from Google+ to Twitter

Automatically sharing your Google+ posts on Twitter is made extremely easy with ManageFlitter. You can sign up to use the site using your Twitter account. Once you’ve done that, just head over to the ‘Dashboard’ and click on ‘Turn on/off Google+ sharing”. All you’ll need to activate the feature is your Google+ profile URL. Once you enter it, you should know that your accounts are connected by the welcome message including a link to your profile.

social media management

If you want to toggle the feature on and off – you just head over to the same place to deactivate it.

Post from Google+ to Facebook

The easiest way to post from Google+ to Facebook is to find out what your secret Facebook email upload address is. You can find this by going to the mobile upload page. If you’re logged in – you’ll see what your address is straight away. When creating a new post on Google+, just add that address to the people you’re sharing the post with, and it will automatically show up on your Facebook page. The drawback to using this method is that any photos you upload or videos you share won’t be included in the post. This method is only useful for cross-posting text only updates.

To share all kinds of updates from Google+ to Facebook, you’ll have to put a little bit more effort into the process. First, you’ll need to be able to access your Google+ RSS feed. We’ve already shown you several ways to do that - so pick the method that suits you best. Once you have your RSS feed, you’ll need to use it with the Facebook app RSS Graffiti. After granting RSS Graffiti access to your Facebook profile (and pages you manage), you can ‘add a new publishing plan’.

You’ll then need to fill in two pieces of information – your Source and your Target. Your Source is your Google+ RSS feed. You can also choose how frequently the feed is updated and how many posts to include per update.

social media dashboard

The next step will be choosing your Target – which Facebook profile or page you want the updates to appear on. If you don’t have any Facebook pages, only your profile will show up in the list. You can then choose from three different update types – but the best option will probably be Standard which will include any images, videos or audio files you share.

Do you have any tips or tricks on how to turn Google+ into the ultimate social media dashboard? Let us know in the comments.


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Nancy Messieh

Nancy is a writer, photographer and editor, living between Washington DC and Cairo. You can find her on Twitter .

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  • Eric Wilborn November 21, 2012
    0 likes

    I like the walkthrough, but I’m not a fan of crossposting. Each of my social networks has its own purpose and groups of people, so things are not often fit for all three (or even two of the three).

    • juan david gil November 21, 2012
      0 likes

      couldn have said it any better; you won this day sir

    • Anthony Monori February 18, 2013
      0 likes

      Exactly! Thank you for putting those words out!

  • Gustavo Reis November 21, 2012
    0 likes

    Wow, I don’t knows what was new from Google Plus, it seems me to be revolutionary and evolutive. I like it!

  • Lisa Santika Onggrid November 21, 2012
    0 likes

    I think every social media has its own function and uses, so doing this kind of thing would be highly redundant. I don’t like having a blog post comprises of one or two sentences (like FB, Twitter, or Google+ posts usually are).
    That aside, there might be many people in need for this plugin.

  • Bitmantra November 21, 2012
    0 likes

    I like it

  • Mac Witty November 21, 2012
    0 likes

    The only crossposting I like is twitter, facebook, g+ as widget at one side in a blog. People who post the same on all platforms makes me tired

  • Terafall November 21, 2012
    0 likes

    I never knew Google+ has that function

  • Sri Vastav Reddy November 21, 2012
    0 likes

    RSS graffiti is the best :)

  • Barry November 21, 2012
    0 likes

    Postolog.com works great too

    • Marcos November 21, 2012
      0 likes

      I think it will work for my moderate use and to easily communicate with students on various fronts, at once.

  • Martin D Redmond November 21, 2012
    0 likes

    Can G+ be used to LinkedIn Groups?

  • PeterW November 21, 2012
    0 likes

    While different platforms are more suited for different forms of communication, I still have an automatic crossposting system (though I really only use it for promoting blog posts now).

    I have an IFTTT account running one recipe: when I make a public Google+ post, copy it to Twitter. Twitter then passes it to Facebook.

    If I want to make a G+ post just for G+, I just have to set the post’s privacy to “My Circles” instead of “public”. If I want to make a post just for Facebook, I go to Facebook. If I want to make a post just for Twitter, I tag it #nofb.

  • Ernesto November 22, 2012
    0 likes

    What would be valuable to me is to go the opposite direction and be able to post to G+ from Facebook. From what I have learned is that Google is tight with their API and does not allow this. I found a work around using my secret G+ email but it lacks photos and videos attached to the original Facebook post. Any suggestions?

  • Dialus November 22, 2012
    0 likes

    nice post and very very useful as Google+ buzzing now days and it is going to share most space in social media, we should know the importance and how to use it .

  • Paul November 22, 2012
    0 likes

    this is interesting, I don’t want to write one thing 3 times, I just need one platform and the rest can sort itself out…

  • magiman7 November 22, 2012
    0 likes

    You can also use a chrome or firefox extension (http://streamified.com/) to copy your posts from g+ to facebook or twitter. The nice option is that for each post you make on g+ you can change if you want them to go to facebook or twitter with a simple click, just like adding or removing people or circles on a post. It handles pictures and links too.

  • Paul November 22, 2012
    0 likes

    Glad to see Daniel picking up some well deserved attention. G+Blog is an awesome plugin. Another app worth of attention is #DoShare.

  • Pete Chilcott November 22, 2012
    0 likes

    Any thoughts on Socialba, even though that doesn’t post to WordPress?

  • Linda Strawn November 26, 2012
    0 likes

    I tried this today using the facebook and googleplusfeed but it hasn’t posted anything on my facebook. i clicked the “as soon as possible” and “system max” in the settings. i must have done something wrong….. but not sure how i get back to those apps to adjust settings…

  • Linda Strawn November 26, 2012
    0 likes

    i got it to work! But the post only shows my comment and some text verbiage, no artwork and the title of the site or the article doesn’t show either. i’ll keep playing with it.

  • Fakhruddin Ahmad November 26, 2012
    0 likes

    gotta try this. I used Friend+Me for a lately. It did a good job, but the delay was long.

  • vjanardhanreddy November 27, 2012
    0 likes

    veryimportentinpresentdays

  • Robert Angle November 27, 2012
    0 likes

    I use the WordPress plugin with my domain http://www.robertangle.com and then Networked Blogs to import the RSS feed to Facebook. I haven’t heard of RSS Graffiti before. I’ll have to check into it.

  • RH hassan November 27, 2012
    0 likes

    niceeeee

  • Muz RC November 28, 2012
    0 likes

    Google is always the best…

  • Easton Wiki November 28, 2012
    0 likes

    I love the UI for google + and the iPad application. Might have to try this out and switch to G+

  • SPINX INC. November 30, 2012
    0 likes

    These are truly fantastic tips for using Google Plus to share your stuff with Facebook and Twitter Feed. In addition to this, by using a G+ account a user can share his/her post directly to three different networks from Google Plus. In this regard, you can try G++ extension that converts G+ into an integrated social platform. You can also visit http://gplusplus.me/ for more details.

  • Richard McGrath December 5, 2012
    0 likes

    You could use hootsuite if your not using wordpress to power your blog/website, hootsuite will publish your rss feed to all your social networks at once. Its quick and easy to do.

  • Giggity Goebbels December 10, 2012
    0 likes

    I rather not crosspost

  • comocom January 2, 2013
    0 likes

    Very useful! Thanks a lot! Though it is true that not always crossposting suitable, quite often it may be of great use and really save time. Great information to remember and excellent examples.

  • Rama moorthy April 24, 2013
    0 likes

    Google+ RSS to facebook or twitter using IFTTT ..
    Paid version of Dlvr.it service (for Google+ posting)

  • Rama moorthy April 24, 2013
    0 likes

    Why not hack Google+Blog plugins PHP and delete the site link in free version ..?
    Instead of their link we may add our own website links …!

    or they have any code for blocking that ..?