To automate or not to automate, that is the question. A question that gets some bloggers a little riled up! Is autoposting a big no-no, or is it an incredible time-saver? This post will discuss why, when, and how you might want to automate some of your tasks and lighten your bloggy load!
I’m writing this post as part of the Blogathon, and I hope that you will find it full of useful information. At the bottom you’ll find a mini challenge that you can complete. Only Blogathon participants are eligible to win prizes.
Embracing Automation
A Case for Automation
Let’s make one thing clear. Automation is not spam. Or it shouldn’t be. Yes, if I wanted to, I could autotweet the same blog post link every two minutes, but I (and most people, I think) would consider that spam. But what if you tweet the same blog post link every two weeks? And in between you are sharing other posts, and your friends’ content, and funny cat videos?
My point is that the word “automation” or “autoposting” shouldn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth. You can do it, and you can do it right.
But autoposting isn’t authentic!
I’m not suggesting that you autopost everything. But you were going to share your latest blog post on Facebook anyway, right? If you automate, you can share the same link, with the same wording and photo, but you might schedule the post to go out when you know your readers are on Facebook. Or you might schedule the post to repeat once a month, so you can continue to share it to more people without any more effort on your part.
If your goal is bringing value to your readers, then you’ll always be “authentic!” <–And you can tweet that!
But I heard that autoposting doesn’t reach as many people!
Have you tested it? I’m not going to give you lists of stats to backup my love for autoposting. I can tell you that in general, using the tools that I use, my autoposted content gets seen about as much as my manually posted content. And many of my blogging colleagues have reported the same.
Try it out. See what happens.
Continue to the next page to read about Blogging Automation Tools!
I don’t use automation often, but when I do, I use it mostly on Facebook and my blog. If I know I’m not going to be near a computer for a while (and since I still haven’t figured out posting from my tablet, especially copy and paste), I will auto-post so I know everything gets out on time.
Auto-posting doesn’t seem you have to spam everyone – it can be helpful when you can’t post right then and there! And you’re right – my auto-posts see about the same amount of traffic (if not a tiny bit more) than if they were regularly posted.
My blog is really just going live now, however I would very much like to automate when posts go live. I have looked into post planner but will check out the first one you mentioned.
I try to automate as much as I can – work smarter not harder right? The only platfrom I tend to post manually to more often than not is Facebook because I just seem to have a better reach than when autoposting on that one. I am going to try Evergreen Post Tweeter instead of my current plug-in for sharing older posts – the current one has a lot of glitches so this may work better. Thanks for sharing and for hosting a mini-challenge!
My blog will be switching over to WordPress in February and I will be trying out the Evergreen Post Tweeter. Right now I use Buffer but it would be great to be able to skip that post. I like to auto post to everything except Facebook. I was auto posting to Facebook, but I didn’t get any views, so now I schedule through the Facebook scheduler and I get a few extra views.
I know that revive old post has issues (it’s constantly needing updating now) and I’d like to try this out. Does it retweet every post that you tag at the time you set? I want to be sure not to put to many on the list if I do this. 🙂
You just set your times that you want tweets to go out, and it rotates through your tagged posts. So only one tweet each time!
OMG, how I never heard of Evergreen Post Tweeter before, I have no clue, but I have a feeling its going to be one of my fave plugins this year! Thanks so much for the heads up on that one. Its installed, and currently I’m using a broad approach – pretty much anything goes that was published in the past six months. I wish it would include a featured image, but its still awesome! 🙂
I’ve been using Jetpack social shares forever, but have found recently that it wasn’t picking up my posts for Facebook and LinkedIn (best guess is issues with Cloudflare.) I’ve switched over to IFTTT recently and love it for everything but Facebook (with jetpack you could customize a bit, and I usually would want to add a hashtag.) Anyhow, at this point, I’m thinking I’ll look into SNAP if the customizations are as awesome as they sound, though I love IFTTT for Twitter at least ’cause it adds your featured image to the post. 🙂
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Yes, it would be nice if EPT included the featured image. NextScripts/SNAP DOES share the image and allows you to add hashtags and any other text you want. I use IFTTT for some things, but SNAP is definitely my autoposting plugin of choice!