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

If 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.

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:



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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.