Lots of flexibility for FREE but requires some setup

I’ve been searching for a replacement for Mailchimp’s Social plugin that would broadcast posts to Facebook and Twitter and also bring in comments from those platforms as WordPress comments into your site.

I haven’t had an opportunity to test the comment importing but the auto-posting works correctly for the situation I experience most often … scheduled posts with custom social media content per post.

I see lots of people having issues with this plugin and my guess is the issues are related to the configuration required to get everything working.

1. You have to set up your own apps at the social networks. This is not hard and there are plenty of step-by-step tutorials out there for it but this part is not handled for you

2. There are a lot of configuration options for the social network integrations – what role in WP can auto-post? what type of post can be auto-posted? what social networks are setup to auto-post by default? If you don’t have this all configured correctly (I had the wrong roles selected at one point) then it won’t work.

3. WP-Cron! Although the author has a page dedicated to explaining how this works and how it should be configured I think there is a lot of mystery for most site runners since wp-cron/linux cron is something managed by the web host typically. Assuming you can get this configured correctly then everything should work! (for FREE!)