Blogging Automation Tools
Okay, I’ll give it a try…um how?
I use three tools that I swear by and absolutely love. They range from free to one-time fee to monthly subscription, and they have varying degrees of difficulty for setup and use, but I believe they are worth the time and monetary investment. Here they are:
Evergreen Post Tweeter
I’m sure you have some older posts that are just rock stars but don’t get the traffic they deserve.
Evergreen Post Tweeter (EPT) is a plugin for WordPress that will autotweet your posts, based on some guidelines that you create. The reason I love this plugin is that it gives the option to autotweet based on a tag. So, the way I use it is, any time I write a post that I would consider to be “evergreen” (something that people would find useful and relevant at any time), I tag it with “TWT.” You could use any tag or category you want. Or don’t use a tag or category. You can set it to send out posts that are between 3 and 7 days old, for example. It’s a simple plugin with some great options.
I’ve already set up EPT to autotweet only the posts with the TWT tag, so it won’t be tweeting out giveaways that have ended or Halloween crafts in May. I can set the days and times that I want the tweets to go out, and I can customize the tweets, adding text (hashtag, Twitter handle) to the beginning or end.
This is the free tool, and the easiest setup. You set it and forget it…except if you use my method, you have to remember to add the special tag to the posts you want it to send out.
NextScripts (SNAP)
NextScripts or SNAP (Social Networks Auto Poster) is the plugin that saves me the most time. In a nutshell, you connect the social networks that you want your blog post to be autoposted to when it goes live, and the plugin posts on all of those networks for you when you hit publish (or later, if you choose to delay the social sharing to a later time).
I love NextScripts because you can set defaults for your autoposting on each network, but then you can make changes on a post-by-post basis. The plugin adds some widgets below your writing area in your post writing/editing screen, and you can make changes to your social shares before publishing the post. Maybe that particular post isn’t right for Pinterest, so you uncheck the box for sharing on Pinterest. Maybe you want to add in a hashtag for when it posts to Twitter. You can do it all right there.
This is a great plugin if you feel strongly about manually posting to one network (say Facebook) and want to autopost to everything else. You can rely on NextScripts to get your links out to all your other platforms, and you can just head over to Facebook after publishing your post and post your link manually.
There is a free version of NextScripts, but the pro version ($50 one-time fee) includes Google+ and Pinterest, and allows you to link more than one account for each network.
Meet Edgar
I’m going to just touch on Meet Edgar briefly, because I wrote a whole review/tutorial on how awesome Meet Edgar is.
Meet Edgar is a site that allows you to post your content to Facebook and Twitter, among other networks. The thing that sets Edgar apart from other social sharing tools is that it saves your content in a library and reposts it based on a schedule you create. You don’t have to continually replenish your feed of content.
My suggestion is that you take time initially to get all of your best older posts saved in Edgar, set up a schedule for sharing those posts, and then add any new evergreen posts into Edgar as you publish them.
Meet Edgar has a monthly subscription structure and costs $49 per month.
Continue to the next page for some final thoughts and the Blogathon Mini Challenge!
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!