How do you share your website’s new content with your fans? RSS, Facebook, Twitter?

Those are all great, but how about being able to push a message right to the cell phones of your eager fans?! Well, the people over at Roost have the solution for you.

With Roost, a website owner simply signs up for an account at Roost.me, then share their personal Roost URL or invite owners via email to follow your “messages.” Your fans will download a small app to their iPhone or Andoid phone and they will receive messages you send via Roost. The service is also available for the Safari desktop browser and the people at Roost say Chrome and Firefox are soon to follow.

With the free Roost plan, website owners can send 1 million messages for free each month. Premium Roost plans allow website owners to automatically send messages via RSS, group users and send messages to specific groups, send messages to users based on geolocation and more.

Roost Web Push WordPress Plugin

With the Roost Web Push WordPress plugin, Roost users can send a message directly from their WordPress website dashboard.

The Roost Web Push plugin settings are simple, with only three options to turn on:

• Auto Push – To automatically notify fans of new blog posts. This is the most exciting feature of the Roost Web Push plugin!
• Mobile push support – To add a bar on your website, asking first time visitors to sign up to receive your Roost messages
• Activate all Roost features – To automatically enable new Roost features when they become available

As well, the Roost Web Push WordPress plugin offers 3 shortcodes to add to your website and/or posts:

• [RoostBar] – Inserts the Roost bar – as in mobile push support above – on individual pages/posts
• [Roost] – Inserts the small Roost button. Clicking the Roost button opens a popup asking the visitor to enter their cell phone number to receive your messages
• [RoostMobile] – Inserts the larger Roost button

Roost Web Push Review

I think Roost has something good here, giving website owners yet another way to send messages to users and combined with WordPress to automatically notify fans of new posts, this is a great plugin and service for WordPress website owners.

With the praise, there are a few more features I would like to see in the Roost Web Push WordPress plugin

• Being pretty new, Roost is largely unknown, so I would like to see the Roost shortcode buttons mention exactly what Roost does before a user clicks on the button
• I would like to see the option to automatically add the button to all blog posts/pages/custom page types. Sure, I know the website owner can use the do_shortcode WordPress template tag in their theme template files, but for a novice WordPress user simplicity and speed of use is key
• The ability to invite users to use Roost with your website from the WordPress dashboard would be a nice feature – Such as registered users. Of course, you can easily send your specialized Roost URL via email or newsletter, but it is always nice to do as much as possible from one location

Recommendation

Roost.me and the Roost Web Push WordPress plugin are most definitely worth checking out, if you are looking for new ways to share your website content with fans… and who isn’t?!