Every time I publish a blog post, I have a second job. Open Facebook, paste the link, write a caption. Open LinkedIn, do it again. It only takes a few minutes, but it is exactly the kind of chore that gets skipped on a busy day, and a post nobody sees might as well not exist.
I tried to automate it earlier this year with a free scheduling tool. It fell apart at the first step. Facebook and LinkedIn will not let a small homegrown tool post on your behalf until you go through a business verification process built for much bigger companies.
The answer turned out to be a sharing tool from a company that works hand in hand with my blogging software. They have already been through that verification, so you just log in and pick where your posts should go. The catch was that my own website would not let it in.
If that sounds familiar, it should. A few days ago I wrote about how a security upgrade locked a client out of editing their own website. My security had gotten too tight again, and this time it was locking out a visitor I actually wanted.
How the System Works
- Publish Once, Share Everywhere: When a post goes live, it now shows up on my Facebook Page and my LinkedIn profile at the same moment, with the title, picture, and link filled in.
- Scheduled Posts Count Too: I write posts ahead of time and set them to go out every few days. The sharing happens at the scheduled time, even if I am at work or asleep.
- One Trusted Visitor, Not an Open Door: The sharing service needs to talk to my website through a side entrance that hackers love to attack. That entrance now opens only for the sharing company's own computers. Everyone else still gets turned away.
- No New Bills: The sharing tool, the security service in front of my site, and the hosting setup behind it are all things I already had. Nothing new to pay for.
Overcoming the Friction
1. Three Locks on the Same Door
My first attempt to connect simply failed with a vague error. Digging in, I found that my website has three separate layers of security, and each one had its own lock on that side entrance. The outer security service was blocking it. The traffic director in the middle was blocking it. The server at the very back was blocking it twice.
That is good security. It was also the reason nothing worked. I had to open each lock just enough for one trusted visitor, in the right order, and test each layer on its own so I knew exactly which one was answering.
2. A Lock That Was Looser Than I Thought
While checking each layer, I found something I did not like. On two of my older sites, the outer lock let through anyone who knew the right phrase to type at the end of the web address. The inner locks were still stopping them, so nothing bad had happened. But "the next lock will catch it" is not a plan.
I tightened that outer lock first, before opening anything else. Now it checks two things: the right phrase, and whether the visitor is actually coming from the sharing company's published list of computers. A stranger who guesses the phrase still gets blocked at the front gate.
3. Facebook Forgot About My New Page
Facebook will not let any outside tool post to a personal profile, so I created a business Page for the blog. Then the new Page refused to show up in the list of places to share. My two older business Pages showed up fine.
The cause was buried in Facebook's settings. At some point in the past, I had given this same sharing tool access to my older Pages, and Facebook kept reusing that old list instead of asking again. Once I found the tool in Facebook's "Business integrations" settings and checked the box for the new Page, it showed up. It took three tries before Facebook actually saved the change.
The Business Win
- A Chore Gone for Good: Every post now reaches Facebook and LinkedIn without me lifting a finger, including the ones scheduled weeks ahead.
- Tighter Security Than Before: The project ended with my sites better protected than when it started, because the loose outer lock got fixed along the way.
- Zero Added Cost: Everything ran on tools and services I was already using.
If you found this post on Facebook or LinkedIn, it got there on its own. The next step is adding the same automatic sharing to the business sites I look after, so their news reaches customers the same day it goes up.
Curious what this looks like for something you need built? See more of these side by side on the case studies page.
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