Morrigan Kig

IFTTT have now imposed a subscription model which means my preferred way to crosspost across my main social networks has become harder.

I do not agree with their decision so have deleted my IFTTT accounts. But now need alternatives to crossposting.

Only one free tool so far allows crossposting without too much hassle, and that's Hootsuite.

The tool allows you to hook up three social networks (more if you pay) and you can post to all three at the same times. I hooked up Twitter, Facebook Pages and Instagram.

You can post text and it will post to all the networks you specified. Of course Instagram won't allow text-only posts as it's an image-centric network.

Images that are out of effective aspect ratio can be edited within Hootsuite, but that will butcher the quality of the image (see my MTG Alice pics on Twitter to see what I mean)

There is a bit of a catch with Instagram. You cannot post to Instagram from Hootsuit directly unless you link a Facebook page to your Instagram account. You can still post to Instagram without it -- you just need the Hootsuite app on your phone, and then use the app to finalise and do the actual post to Instagram (from your phone).

I use Twitter, Facebook Pages and Instagram as my social networks and a Wordpress blog (obviously, since you're reading this)

Instagram has a crosspost functionality within the app, but it is horrendously bad. It just posts a link on your Twitter feed or Facebook feed and you're then reliant on the viewer's client interpreting it properly. Some clients will not preview the link unless you open up the Tweet. TweetDeck is notorious for this. Twitter's Web Client is better, and some mobile Twitter apps (Plume, Fenix, Carbon) are pretty good at previewing links out of the box./

That's why when I crosspost, I prefer having a copy of the media posted with the tweet. IFTTT did this automatically, and I liked that. Using Hootsuite posts the media independently of each social network. So Twitter, Facebook and Instagram all get their own copy of the media uploaded, no crosslinking required.

Wordpress, however, is a bit more annoying. It does provide crossposting onto Twitter. However, it, like Instagram, just puts a link of the blog article , and does not paste a copy of any image on your article, or lets you choose which image (if any) from your article to use. You can, however, modify the tweet text, but that's about it.

A new feature, however, has been added to Wordpress that allows you post your blog entry as a series of tweets, and looks like you can embed pictures during that thread and they should upload, I haven't tried that yet.

There is another tool that I have seen mentioned called Huginn, but I've not checked that out in detail. It does look pretty complicated to use though.