In this video (How to Schedule Facebook posts & Twitter updates using blog) you’ll learn how to schedule your Facebook and Twitter updates for free while improving your site SEO and building authentic and honest appearance on social media.
Social Media that has positive return on investment (ROI) is about sharing great content that educates, entertains or inspires your audience. In order to get maximum benefit from your social media efforts in terms of traffic and social impact your presence need to be consistent. Are you bombarding your followers with multiple updates at once or sharing only once in a while? No matter what the case is, in the next 5 minutes you will learn how to automate your social media updates while building relationships and increasing engagement of your audience. Getting constantly distracted to publish Facebook post or Twitter message is not a wise use of your time. After all, we have personal lives and circumstances that may prevent us from constantly being online and you probably don’t want your social media efforts interfere with your real world life.
The easy solution to automate social media is to schedule social media updates, and, there are number of apps like Buffer, HootSuite that allow scheduling of updates but if you want to use several accounts or post more than few updates a day you have to purchase premium version of those services. In this video you’ll learn how you can schedule unlimited updates to unlimited number of accounts and add as many team members as you want. And you don’t have to spend a dime!
Brief Overview
Learn 3 step system to schedule social media updates
Here is the brief overview of the strategy we’re going to use:
- Step 1. Create or find content that is perfect for sharing on Social Media websites
- Step 2. Schedule posts with amazing content in one of the categories on our Blog
- Step 3. Syndicate RSS feed of that category using service called Twitter Feed
Now let’s go over each step in details, so you can get the most from this strategy by utilizing closely guarded secrets and little-known tweaks that will maximize traffic and click through rate (CTR). To be able fully customize all the aspects of social media updates I use WordPress SEO by Yoast which you can download for free from WordPress plugin directory:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/
When you install WordPress SEO by Yoast make sure you enable “Add OpenGraph meta data” in the “Social” settings tab.
While sharing content in social media you have 2 options: share your own content which leads to your own website or share link to someone else’s content. Let’s get one thing straight, when I am talking about sharing content I mean valuable information, knowledge, advice, systems, case studies, content that educates, entertains or inspires your audience with occasional mix of self-promotional messages. If all you share is unrelated affiliate links and updates with core message being “buy my stuff” you won’t succeed in social media.
Creating and Gathering Content
Since amazing original content takes time and effort to produce I prefer to share inspiring and thought-provoking content as a base, as it fits almost any audience. One of the great sources of such content is inspirational quotes and life lessons from thought leaders. Just type in “famous quotes” in Google and you have plenty of great material to share.
What I like doing is to pick quotes that are related to my website and niche and then for each quote find related video and add 200-300 words of unique text. This allows creating valuable post with great content in a matter of minutes, and because each post contains unique text in a form of my thoughts, opinion, ideas and takeaways it acts like small traffic magnet bringing more traffic from Search Engines.
Formatting Posts
Now that we have main body of the post ready, it is time to format our posts for best CTR and engagement.
Formatting Posts For Twitter
Twitter only allows 140 characters so try to make sure your message makes sense within that limit. I use excerpts as a short summary of my posts, this is the text that is going to be posted on Twitter.
If you’re going to use quotes of the famous people or share a link to someone else’s content, make sure you mention their Twitter username in the body of your tweet like this @BillGates or @tonyrobbins – then the person you mentioned will see your tweet in their “Mentions” section which opens lines of communications and opportunity for more traffic as they may retweet your message.
Formatting Posts For Facebook
Since Facebook supports post thumbnails, make sure you set featured image for every post, it should be relevant to the topic of your update or represent an idea of your post. I prefer square featured images at least 300*300 pixels all the way up to 800*800 pixels. By default Facebook will use title and meta description of your post as the text of your update, if you want to craft customized description, click “Social” on WordPress SEO by Yoast panel and fill out “Facebook Description” you can also customize “Google+ Description” if you want.
External Resources
If you prefer to share a link to someone else’s website you can easily do that, all you have to do is to add URL of that link to “301 Redirect” field on the “Advanced” tab of WordPress SEO by Yoast. Let’s say I want to share a link to this great resource that I think my audience will find interesting. I will simply paste the URL into “301 redirect” field, set featured image for the post, fill out Excerpt field for Twitter message and Facebook description and schedule it for the date when I want it to be posted. Since, this post is a redirect to external resource you probably don’t want to include it in a sitemap or to be indexed by Search Engines.
Posts With No Unique Text
If you decide to post let’s say “famous quotes” without writing any unique content that would serve simply as updates on your social networks I would suggest to exclude those pages from sitemap and forbid Search Engines from indexing them.
Scheduling Social Media Updates
After you have your content ready, don’t click “Publish” as we’re going to schedule it. Just save that post as draft. Since you probably want your update to be seen by as many people as possible and get as many clicks as you can, you need to share it when it has the most potential to be seen. In one of the case studies conducted by bitly, they measured the best time to share on different social networks:
For highest click through rate (CTR) the best time to share on Twitter is 1-3pm EST Monday through Thursday. The peak traffic times for Twitter are 9am through 3pm, Monday through Thursday.
For highest click through rate (CTR) the best time to share on Facebook is 1pm to 4pm EST Monday through Thursday. The peak traffic times for Facebook are 11am through 3pm, Monday through Thursday.
This is not exact science and your CTR and number of impressions may vary depending on your audience browsing habits, their geographical locations and day of the week, but as a general rule of thumb try to share your updates on Twitter and Facebook from 9 am to 4 pm. Again, this is not exact science, so the best way to see what is working for your audience is to test and then test again.
In order to keep scheduled content in one place, I like to put it in one category on my blog, something like “best of the web” or “famous quotes”, it doesn’t really matter as long as the name makes sense to you.
Posting RSS to Facebook and Twitter
Next thing you need is to locate RSS feed of category that contains all your scheduled posts. Just go to “Categories”, click “View” and then add “feed” at the end of category URL. So, if the name of the category is “Best Of The Web” RSS feed of that category on my website will be located at:
http://www.ridethefortune.com/category/best-of-the-web/feed
We’re going to use free service called Twitter Feed (http://twitterfeed.com) that allows to publish any RSS feed to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Twitter Feed even provides you with the real time stats on how many clicks you get for each post. Next thing you need to do is to add your category RSS feed to Twitter Feed. I usually separate posting to Twitter and Facebook because of the format how the message is displayed, so I add my category feed twice, but only activate one service at a time.
Step 1: Name Feed & Add Source URL
Name you feed something you can recognize, as later you may have several other feeds in your dashboard and if you name all of them “Blog” they may be hard to distinguish.
In the “Advanced Settings” section I usually set:
Check for new posts: every 30 minutes and post up to 5 new updates at a time.
For post content:
- Facebook: Include Title and Description
- Twitter: Include Description Only
Step 2: Configure Publishing Services
Currently Twitter Feed supports posting to:
For Twitter and LinkedIn you simply need to authorize Twitter Feed application using secure protocol. For Facebook there is an extra step, if you want to post to a Page rather than the account itself, click ‘Connect with Facebook’ and chose a Page that you want to publish to.
That’s pretty much it, as far as configuring the system of automated social media updates, all you have to do at this point is to schedule more great content. Let’s quickly review what we have achieved.
Benefit 1. – Automatic updates of your social media profiles with great content to keep your audience engaged and grow your following
Benefit 2. If you decided to add some unique text to your scheduled posts in addition to Benefit 1 you also get benefit of growing your site, improving rankings in Search Engines and growing your traffic, all while providing great value to your followers.
Benefit 3. Because you schedule your updates to be posted during peak traffic times you’ll get more clicks and impressions.
Additional Tweaks
If this wasn’t enough for you, here are couple tips to put some extra bells and whistles on this system. If you use any bookmarking service like Delicious or Diigo, then most likely you have tons of valuable links that you can share with audience, simply schedule them using “301 Redirect”. This way you have weeks’ worth of great content to share. You can actually turn all your online activity into audience-growing, list-building, traffic-generating process that runs on auto pilot. Grab public RSS of your bookmarks, for Delicious it will be located at http://www.delicious.com/v2/rss/username and plug it into Twitter Feed, now when you bookmark great resource, it will be automatically shared with your followers, if you don’t want to share, simply mark bookmark as private.
If you use YouTube you can share your public videos on Twitter and Facebook using your feed. If you use default YouTube sharing tab, it only supports sharing to Facebook profile, but you can always pick up feed of your public videos, which is located at
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/username/uploads
and plug it into Twitter Feed, so you can share videos on Facebook fan pages.