How To Automate Twitter with Content Libraries
Today I'm going to introduce you to an epic little tool called Recurpost!
First off, I want to say I am not sponsored to write this post - Recurpost is a FREE online tool that I discovered a few months ago after Buffer killed their content library beta feature. I moaned about it on Twitter and Recurpost tweeted me telling me about their free service, so I was like HELL YES I will try this out!
A couple months in and I'm loving it; this tool is so easy to use and it's definitely been helping to take the stress out of keeping my Twitter up to date.
How does this tool help, exactly?
Recurpost allows you to create content libraries, where you upload posts/images/content in advance, and then it publishes your posts to Twitter (or Facebook/LinkedIn if you wish!) as the pre-set scheduled time. BUT what makes this different from a normal scheduling tool is that it keeps your posts available in the library, to recycle again and again without you having to re-upload.
+ Upload content once, publish multiple times without doing anything
+ Set up the schedule once, and it leave it to do its thing
+ Organise your posts into multiple content libraries to keep things categorised (eg. Blog posts, quotes, images)
+ Specify when you want your post to stop being recycled or if you want it to be published only once, or forever!
+ You can set it up to schedule for the 'best time', so you don't even have to spend time specifying a schedule yourself if you don't want to!
+ Set up a feed directly from your blog in Recurpost to take automation to the next level!
= More time to do important business stuff!
How to Get set up easily:
1. CREATE AN ACCOUNT & LINK YOUR TWITTER PROFILE
When you create an account, you'll first want to connect your Twitter profile so that Recurpost can start automatically sharing your content for you. You'll see here that you can also connect Facebook and LinkedIn too - I personally don't like posting things more than once to these platforms but that's totally up to you.
2. CREATE A CONTENT LIBRARY AND ADD SOCIAL UPDATES
Go into the 'Content Library' tab and click to set up a new one; name it what you like, and keep the box unchecked if you want the updates in that library to be recycled continuously.
Then you can start adding updates to your content library by clicking the 'Add an update' button. You can also 'Add in Bulk', which is great for quickly scheduling large amounts of text/link posts to your content library!
However, on the normal 'Add an Update' section, it's great for posting links, as Recurpost will automatically generate a link preview for you to see and edit when you paste your link into the content box.
As you can see, you're also able to set when you want this post to stop recycling as well. This is super useful for seasonal content, or things you think won't be relevant after a certain time.
3. POSTING DIRECTLY FROM A BLOG? TAKE AUTOMATION A STEP FURTHER...
If you want to literally do NOTHING and still have your blog posts published to Twitter regularly, this is a game-changing tip. You can set up a feed directly from your blog in Recurpost's 'Feed Manager', so that when you publish a blog post on your blog, Recurpost will automatically add this to your content library, so you don't even have to open the damn tool!
If you select 'Add to library after approval', you will need to open Recurpost to approve pending posts lined up in your RSS feed, but if you choose 'without approval', then you don't have to do anything!
4. CREATE A SCHEDULE
Now you just need to create a schedule for when you want Recurpost to publish your posts and how often. You can do this by going to the 'Schedule' tab and clicking 'Add new schedule'. Here you can select which Content Library you want this schedule to pull posts from, and which social media account you want it to post them to, as well as how often and at what times.
As far as I'm aware, you can create as many schedules as you like, in case you want to set specific different times each day or week. However, I just set mine to post daily at the 'best time'.... because I'm lazy!
TIP: Make sure you go into your account settings and make sure your time zone is correct!
5. SIT BACK AND ANALYSE!
And that's it! All you then have to do is sit back and let it do it's thang, and you can check in to your 'Editorial Calendar' to see what it's posting next and see analytics in your 'Reports' tab too.
There are other tools on the market for this service, I should add. I believe one of the biggest brands is MeetEdgar who offer a similar thing but with more features, however I personally can't justify the cost of this tool. Recurpost offers exactly what I need in its free plan, which is great - however, they do also have paid plans that start from $25 per month if you need up to 1000 posts in your content libraries (rather than just 100 on the free plan), which I believe is still cheaper than the Edgar tool.
(Bonus tip for wordpress users...)
If you're using WordPress for your blog and you want to just keep recycling your blog posts to publish on Twitter, you can simply install the 'Revive Old Posts' plugin, which will set this up for you. With this you can choose which posts to keep recycling, how many times a day to share and what hashtags to use too!
