OH! For the Love of Twitter
In case you're wondering this isn't going to be a love letter, and since I was up all night in Live Chat hatching diabolical plans with Steve and trying to find motivational YouTube videos to help keep Jean going through a 10 article writing blitz, this may get a little punchy. (BTW here's one of my favorite that I missed Jean https://youtu.be/LVPNXsc4wsQ ) I'll also warn you that this is going to delve into the area of being a developer, so if you get bored skip to the end and read the PSA that may actually be useful to you in building your site.
My Developers Relationship With Social Media
My night last night started with a reminder of the love/hate relationship I have with Social Media as a developer. As a user of social media, I'm sure you have some idea of all the things third parties can do when writing programs to interact with social media platforms just from using those programs. But as a developer, I have to be honest with you, it's both exhilarating and terrifying the things you can do with social media and for that matter cell phone apps.
All those jokes in movies from the government agent characters about all those years trying to spy on people only to learn that they'll happily give you all their information if you just ask them for it are totally true. You can get a pretty deep look and hook into peope's lives without them even thinking about it. For awhile, when I was still active in IM and before I moved to doing local marketing, I quit building traditional websites and only built social media apps, because it was so much easier to get people's email and so much more. That is the love part.
The hate part, is that every single one of the social media sites has there own rules, formatting, and APIs and they change them constantly. If you think trying to keep up with Google for SEO is bad, it has nothing on trying to write and maintain programs that will function with each of the major social media networks. Plus, unlike Google's search engine algorithms, the social media networks actually publish documents on how to do this and you would think that would make it easier. It doesn't. It just means you feel a lot stupider when you can't get something to work, never mind that at least half the time it's because they failed to update the docs after doing a programming change.
Adventures in Troubleshooting Social Media
So last night, I was trying to help a member get her WP posts to autopost properly on social media. This can be extremely difficult to do for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that the reason mentioned above makes finding a developer willing to create and maintain a free plugin for this virtually impossible. I know because I've tried to create one myself. However, there are a handful of plugins that support this effort by offering a free plugin with a limited number of options and then selling a premium upgrade with additional features.
Among the many problems I was trying to get sorted to get this auto posting thing to work, was that none of her tweets had an image attached with them. She wanted them to look like this:
And instead they looked like this:
I knew that it had to do with the meta tags that social media uses to pull the information they use to create those cute little boxes that appear on your social media feeds. The problem was her site had the image tag for social media, so why wasn't it coming up? The Twitter Card validator kept telling me her site wasn't whitelisted, but that happens automatically now so why wouldn't it just whitelist it?
After installing and testing a half dozen plugins, I finally dove into the Twitter docs to try and figure out what was missing. When I finally figured it out, I seriously wanted to start throwing things against the wall. In order to create those cute little cards on Twitter, they require you to add a tag saying you want it to be a card and not a tweet instead of just defaulting to it like EVERY OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM IN EXISTENCE EVER. To be fair, I started cussing out the lazy developers that couldn't be bothered to add ONE LINE OF CODE to make this work for people!!
And so...
My Twitter Card Public Service Announcement
If the social media plugin that you are using doesn't create those Twitter cards for you because they were too lazy to add a single line of code, you can install the official Twitter Wordpress Plugin and it will do it for you. https://wordpress.org/plugins/twitter/ However, let me add the caveat that they have a horrible rating in the Wordpress Database, and I haven't taken the time to figure out why yet. The only reason I'm recommending it is that it doesn't really do anything else, so it is unlikely to interfere with the plugin you are already using. If I find something better, I'll update this post.
Recent Comments
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LOL ok I thought I was going to have to start breaking out some code. Thanks for the comments
Are the Twitter docs comprehensive enough? Nothing worse than trying to hook into some API only to find that their documentation reads like a dodgy toaster manual!
On a more important note, how are our devious plans coming along?
The Twitter docs are actually pretty great but that's only because they have the least interesting API so there's not much they have to keep up to date. There's a reason people aren't playing games on Twitter. None of the functionality exists to create anything like that.
The WP install finally came up, but I haven't done anything else with it yet. I actually have an idea for the homepage I'll run by you later. He showed up shortly after you left. Claimed to be lurking the entire time, but that nothing we had said piqued his interest.
I'm calling shenanigans. :) I think he over played the all seeing Oz card there and I'm calling that bluff. I'm not, however, ruling out some other lurker ratting us out. Nevertheless, in the face of uncertainty you have no choice but to press on. I think I'll throw up an under construction sign though just in case. :)
LMAO does he know that I set up the site? He knows my arsenal when it comes to themes and plugins. There's not much I don't have already. Unless he's offering to do the design work. That would be awesome. I hate trying to figure out what a site should look like. We'll have to have chat. Glad to see you're already out recruiting :)
I was on Live Chat earlier and Rich was there. I posted the link to our site and Mel was there too.
LOL yeah in PM. Behind close doors. Away from prying eyes. Never reveal a product before it's built.
OK we'll call this buzz marketing, but I'm really going to have to get a construction page up there or people are going to show up, decide it sucks and never come back. LMAO. This definitely be an adventure.
The funny thing was that Rich immediately jumped onto the hyphen thing again and that sparked renewed conversation!
LOL ok that's it. I'm formally requesting a record feature for Live Chat. A guy has to sleep sometime
LMAO. I'm not reading a very generous tone in that comment. I'm getting a hint of me being thick in there. :)
That sounds pretty bleak! I haven't done any social media programming and I thought it would be fun, but I'm changing my mind now. thanks for sharing this info.
Barbara
I'm not saying never do it. But most of the easy stuff to do has already been done and there are plugins and stuff for it. The more complicated stuff can be both very cool and very powerful, but there is a steep learning curve with a lot of banging your head against the wall. If you have something in mind you want to try feel free to run it by me. I can give you an idea of how hard it will be.
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Well, I actually have given up the autopost from my websites to social media. It worked for a while, then stopped. First because I use 2 step verification - that seems to be a big hurdle, and then it didn't seem to work at all (I had next script plugin, about 2-3 years ago). I am missing out with posting, I KNOW. I DO SOMETHING MANUALLY, BUT THE DAY HAS ONLY 24 HOURS AND IN SOME OF THEM I ALSO WANT TO LIVE INSTEAD OF FIGURE OUT WHAT PEOPLE (sorry for big letters) believe I should do. Lol.
I am happy to know thaat people exist who have figured these things out, already, and are going g ahead doing it.....
I keep saying technology is great when it works. :)
If the autoposting works it can save you a lot of time, but like I said the social networks change things so often that the plugins really have to do a good job of keeping up on it. If I figure out a system that works well, I'll post it and maybe you can give it another go.
This would be REALLY great. I hope I won't miss it when your post comes out. I won't be too much here in the next days.
Happy holidays to yyou!
Heidi
Well it won't be the next couple of days. It will probably have to be training so I can break it down step by step, and I haven't hit mark for posting that yet. I'll let you know when it goes up though. Enjoy the holidays. )
Thank you, very appreciated! Happy holidays to you,too!