Social Media Email Alerts for WordPress

Social Media E-Mail Alerts

Introduction

Have you ever noticed that your site was submitted to social media sites, but only days after the submission? Ever wished you had known about the submission so you take measures to increase the visibility of the submission?

By settng up rules that are specific to the traffic patterns of your site, you can be notified of a new social media submission when the initial visitors from that submission come trickling in. For social media sites like Digg.com where your window of opportunity to act is just 24 hours, this early notification can be the difference between thousands of visitors and next to none.

Installation

1. Upload the social-media-email-alerts folder to the ‘/wp-content/plugins/' directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugin's menu in WordPress.
3. Set up the rules for triggering an alert on the admin page. Rules can be based on referring domain e.g. Digg.com or by parameters in the querystring e.g. source=twitter.com.

Example 1:

These settings will send an e-mail if your site receives 5 visitor from Digg.com to any one page on your site within a 60 minute window.

Value to Match: digg.com
Min. Visits: 5
Reset (minutes): 60

Example 2:

These settings will send an e-mail if your site receives 10 visits to any one page, within a 2 hour window, and the querystring includes source=twitter.com. In this case, the referring site doesn't matter.

Value to Match: source=twitter.com
Min. Visits: 10
Reset (minutes): 120

You can download the latest version of this plugin from the WordPress repository.

Donations

There is no cost to use this plugin, but donations of any amount are certainly appreciated and will help encourage continued improvement and support of this plugin. Priority support will be given to those that have contributed. Thanks!

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14 Comments

  1. This plugin is not working at all for me. I have tried to configure it according to the directions. I'm using the latest form of Wordpress. I'm not getting any email alerts from this plug-in--period.

    • Can you tell me what settings you've tried?

  2. Hi,

    Thanks for a great plugin- it looks really useful, but I am struggling to get the e-mails to send. I have set minimum to 1 and time to 5 and can generate lots of matching visits in that time, see them on the list, they stay there for a short time, but I get no e-mail.
    I'm using WP Mail SMTP latest version and when I press the button to test the wp mail() function it works fine using the same email address for the test as I have setup for the alerts. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I am using latest WP and have disabled all other plugins to test it.

    Rob

    • Sorry, but I don't know why the e-mails aren't being sent when WP Mail SMTP is used. I use the plugin myself with the standard email delivery functionality of WordPress and I get notifications regularly.

      Marios

  3. Hi Marios,
    I'm not getting the email notifications. I see the matched visits on the admin page, but no emails. I'm using WP 3.7.1.
    I'm using WP-Mail-SMTP 0.9.1plugin, which works reliably on my site on both SMTP and PHP mail settings.
    Rod

    • Hi Rod,

      I've got the plugin enabled on this site and as of last week I was getting notifications. One different is that I'm still running 3.6.1, but I think its unlikely the WordPress upgrades would affect this plugin.

      When you say you see matched visits, does that mean that you're seeing enough visits within the time frame you specified to trigger an e-mail? That is, if you require 5 visits in 5 minutes, but you only get 4 in 5 minutes, there won't be an e-mail triggered.

      • Yes, I am seeing the minimum matched or exceeded but am receiving no email notifications. Other plugins and WP itself are able to send emails.

        The web host is laughingsquid.us.

        Thanks Marios.

  4. Is there a way to track spikes from ANY traffic? Since this plugin notifies quicker than GA, it'd be useful to know any large spikes that maybe due to a site that is not one of the usual suspects (Digg/Reddit/StumbleUpon/HackerNews).
    Useful plugin, thanks!

    • Avatar photo

      Sorry, but there's no way to track everything. I'm sure as soon as it's added, Google Analytics will become real-time :-)

  5. I love this plugin, thanks alot Marios!!

    Is it also possible to block visits when they come via these social media website(s)?

    • Avatar photo

      Hi Marcel,

      This plugin just tracks visits. It can't block them. I'm guessing there's a plugin out there that does what you want. There's a plugin for everything :-)

  6. I installed the plugin and now wondering about query. Do I put them into the "Value To Match" field. Also, can you point me to a list of queries or information about them anywhere on the net?

    • Avatar photo

      Two examples for what you can put in the Value to Match field are given above. Basically you want to match a referring domain e.g. digg.com or a parameter/value pair in the URL such as source=twitter.

  7. This is an invaluable plugin for Wordpress and is bound to be a favorite of many bloggers. Personally, I have found traffic from SM sites such as StumbleUpon and Digg to be some of the best readers and often times accounting for crushing traffic. Thanks Mario!

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