For your social media strategy it is important to know when to publish your posts and what time to post, for all the different social platforms. And to make your life easier, you can make this whole process automatic. If you use social media to post articles, blogs, contest, news, events, or more, this will save you time and energy.
There are many social media sites today, but the main one is Facebook, it has a wide audience and you can reach potentially millions of people. The second is Twitter, you can reach millions of people too, make new connections, and also listen to your audience. These two social mediums are going to control most of our automated posts. Be careful using automated posting though, you want to make sure your posts are consistent on all platforms and that you don’t create duplicate postings.
Assuming you have all your social media accounts setup, lets’ begin our automated system. For our social media strategy we used Facebook as our hub, all our posts begin from there. We will go through the different automatic services beginning with ifttt.com and zapier.com.
IFTTT
IFTTT
IFTTT stands for If This Then That, its slogan is make the internet work for you. That is exactly what it does too, you can search many different scenarios, which they call recipes. The main recipe we want to use here is the Facebook page post to twitter recipe. If you use other social media sites such as Tumblr and Google Plus, you can add those Facebook page recipes too. They also have a mobile app you can download to monitor all of your recipes.
For our social media strategy our Facebook page posts will go to Twitter and Tumblr. We also post to our Facebook page when we pin something to one of our Pinterest boards. This pin will also go to our Tumblr and Twitter because of our other recipes. You cannot forget about Google Plus too, all of our Facebook Posts go to our Buffer queue and they are published on our Google Plus Page via the scheduled Buffer time.
Something to mention if you edit or create your own recipes are the ingredients. Just click on the lab flask, to see all the social media data, or ingredient, you can enter into your messages.
Zapier
Zapier
Zapier is similar to IFTTT, you can create different scenarios too, such as, if you get a follower on twitter send them a Thank You Tweet. The free account is limited to 100 tasks a month and you can only have up to 5 zaps or scenarios. To explore different social zaps, click explore, scroll down and choose social.
It is easy to create a zap, at the top menu just click Make a Zap. Then choose your trigger social platform and the action app, or the social platform you want it to post on. In our social media strategy was to thank all our new Twitter followers, so we created a thank you zap. So when I get a new follower it sends a direct tweet to them saying thank you and asking them to like our Facebook page.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite
Hootsuite Is a great platform to manage and monitor all your social media networks in one place. For example you can monitor your Twitter mentions and messages, but the best part is you can schedule your posts to any of your connected social networks. Just click on add stream, to add your social network you want to monitor, click on add Social Network to add the sites you want to publish your posts to. The networks compatible with Hootsuite are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and WordPress. We use Hootsuite to schedule all our Facebook page posts, and they also have a mobile app you can download too.
Buffer
Buffer
With buffer you can create and schedule your posts to be published on all connected social media accounts. Click on the plus sign next to accounts and connect your social media accounts. The Social media accounts you can add are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Plus. To change the schedule of the posts click on Schedule in the top menu. If you have an IFTTT account you can add posts to your Buffer queue automatically, and they will be published for the times scheduled.
RSS
If you have a blog, find out what your RSS feed is, if you have a WordPress blog, it is usually http://www.nameofwebsite.com/feed/. You can use this RSS feed in different services to automatically publish your blog posts.
Jetpack for WordPress
Jetpack for WordPress
Jetpack for WordPress is a must have for all who have a wordpress site. You can add all your social media share buttons to your blog posts and also automatically publish them to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, or Tumblr.
Go to your dashboard and click Jet Pack in the menu, on the right side under Publicize, click configure to set up your social media accounts and share buttons. Our social media strategy for our blog is, when a post is published it is shared to Facebook automatically. So when you are ready to share just click publish.
Twitter Feed
Twitterfeed
With Twitter Feed you can automatically send your blog post to your social media sites when they are published. To create a Twitter Feed is simply, click Create a New Feed. Then just enter the name of the Feed, and the RSS Feed you are using, which is usually your blog’s RSS feed. Then click go to step 2, and choose the social media site to publish your posts to. The sites you can publish to are Twitter, Facebook, your LinkedIn company page, and your LinkedIn profile page. The Twitter Feed we created for our social media strategy was to have all our blog posts published to our LinkedIn company page.
Dlvr.it
dlvr.it
Dlvr.it is an alternative to Twitter Feed, you can create automated tasks for your blog, Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter accounts. Once you sign in click add route, then next to sources click add, and choose the RSS Feed or social media site you are publishing. Then next to Destination, click add, and choose the social media site you want to publish your post on. For instance you can add your blog RSS feed and it will post to your Facebook page when it is published. You can also change the update frequency of your RSS feed to check for new posts, go to your source editor and it’s under Feed Update.
