If you’re someone who reads a lot of content online as well as writing and posting on social media, this post is for you. I’m always trying to find ways to be more efficient with my time online as it’s very easy to get distracted. The tools below will allow you to spend only a couple of hours each week to gather, curate and post your content on your blog or social media channels.
How To Easily Organise Your Blog’s Content Marketing
You shouldn’t have to waste time scrolling through 100’s of emails from sites you’ve subscribed through via your inbox. Nor should you have to physically visit 100’s of websites to see what new content your favourite sites have published. The easiest way to access the content from your favourite sites each week is through Feedly.
Feedly (https://feedly.com/) gathers news feeds from your top sites and allows you to easily organise them into folders. It also allows you to search for specific topics using keywords within the Feedly platform to subscribe to.
It’s free and you can use your Gmail account to access it. The Feedly app works brilliantly on my iPhone and I love how easy it is to share what I read straight from the app to my social media accounts.
Alltop (http://alltop.com/) is another great place you can source your content from as it collects headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs. It’s not as easy to use as Feedly but still a good platform to get content from.
Scheduling and Posting Your Content
After finding content on Feedly or Alltop you can use this tool to post the content on to your social media channels at the times you know when your audience is online.
Buffer (http://www.buffer.com/) lets you write a group of posts at the same time and choose which social media profiles to send them to. You can use it to post your content throughout the day or week so you don’t have to be at your computer all the time in order to have a social media presence. It also provides you with basic analytics that tells you exactly how many people clicked on each of your links. I like to re-share the most popular links on my social media profile if I notice they have been clicked on many times.
I recommend the paid option for Buffer as the free version is very limited and will not allow you to connect all of your social media accounts to it. I prefer using Buffer on my desktop as I don’t find the app very easy to use. The Buffer extension for Chrome is an awesome tool that lets you to select which social media accounts to post to and when, right from its own share dialog box that pops up.
I also use IFTTT (https://ifttt.com/) for posting content to social media. IFTTT lets you create recipes or actions, which run in the background. For example I have a recipe that states if I post a picture on Instagram to automatically tweet that photo to my Twitter. So because this happens in the background, I make sure to use the most important keywords towards the start of the description text that I post on Instagram as well as only using 1-3 hash tags as all of these hash tags will show up on Twitter.
I try to post 3-5 times on Instagram and because it’s a mobile-based photo-sharing app, not many tools exist which can help make this process easier. Therefore the tool I use is Latergramme (http://www.latergram.me/).I find my photos from Feedly and Alltop, save them to my computer, which I then sync to my iPhone. Once synced to my phone I log into Latergramme once a week to schedule times for all of my images to be posted on Instagram.
I hope I haven’t bombard you to much with this post and for my next post I will share with you the tools I use to report on my various online activities.