Smarterqueue for Facebook

Steal my Systems Series Part 3

*Note: Full disclosure, this post includes my referral link to SmarterQueue. This just means that if you sign up using my link you get a 30 day trial instead of their usual 14 days. Then if you sign up for at least a month, I get a month free credit.

In a previous blog, I explained my system for using SmarterQueue to schedule your Instagram posts so that it doesn’t eat up all your time. And, today, I’m sharing how to do the same for Facebook and Twitter.

While it is very easy to browse an Instagram feed due to its “grid”, with Facebook and Twitter it doesn’t take long for a post to disappear way down the feed.

With Twitter, everything is so fast moving that your posts can get lost really quickly.

With Facebook, the reach of any one post is often much less than 10% of your follower size.

In other words, it is very unlikely that someone will see all of your posts (unless they are a total raving fan!).

This works to your benefit with these two platforms as it means you can post more of the same content, more often – using an amazing social media scheduling tool like SmarterQueue.

And, bonus, this means you don’t need to be coming up with fresh content ideas day in, day out!

You can now leverage all that hard work you put into writing that blog post, or recording that video, or taking those product snaps by re-using them time and time again totally on autopilot.

End result? More eyeballs on your website in virtually no time at all!

Categories, Evergreen, Queues, Libraries, Oh My

This terminology can be totally confusing but let’s break it down with how this whole infinite content thing works in SmarterQueue.

Here’s an example of how I use this to get more traffic, more often to my blog posts.

 Step 1: Create a Category for “Blog Posts Facebook” and “Blog Posts Twitter”

 Step 2: Add your Posts (Image plus caption). Mark them as “Evergreen”

Step 3: Add time slots for your Blog Post categories to your “schedule” – as many as you like for the week. In my case, I have 3 x a week for Facebook and twice a day for Twitter.

Step 4: Leave it!! Yes, that’s it! You will now have those posts going out automatically until you stop it. And anytime, you have a new post you can simply add it to the “queue”

From there it is up to you how many categories you have and how many time slots through the week you want to fill up with automated posts. Other categories might include tips, inspirational quotes, virals, memes, ongoing promotions or product shots.

 

But doesn’t the Facebook Algorithm penalise using schedulers?

 Yes, this is true. Facebook prefers you to use their inbuilt scheduler and therefore rewards you with greater reach. That is why I recommend using this scheduler for any important posts or ones unique to that week.

However, if it is a choice between getting regular posts on there via an outside scheduler than not posting at all – then the outside scheduler wins every time!

In the end, SmarterQueue helps establish a good “minimum” and then any extras I can add through the scheduler.

But doesn’t your Twitter Feed end up looking really really self-promoting?

As Twitter still has a sequential feed, posts disappear on the home feed very very quickly. Businesses have taken full advantage of this by posting 10 times a day – sometimes more! This then makes the feed even busier and move even faster, so they combat this by posting even more often!

It’s a vicious cycle and why Facebook and Instagram have introduced their algorithms and why the use of Twitter is in rapid decline.

Having said that, your audience may be really active on there. So if this is you, then you have to work with the state of play at the moment – which means more posts, more often.

This could be really stressful if you were trying to manually schedule every single post but luckily with schedulers like SmarterQueue you can do it in no time at all.

In my case, while my audience isn’t as active on Twitter, it was so easy to setup and run by itself, with only a new blog post added each week to the queue that it makes it really simple to maintain a presence.

Does this work for my Facebook Groups?

Yes! This was one of the other big selling points for me. When I first started using SmarterQueue, I was posting daily prompts in my Facebook group with the same one going each and every Monday, etc. Instead of having to manually do this every week, I was able to add the one time slot a week, add the daily prompt post and just let it run all by itself.

This also means that if I did want to post to my group at a time when I am not able to do it live, I could do so via SmarterQueue since there isn’t a native group scheduler in Facebook at the time of writing this. (Update: I believe this feature is now being rolled out!! YAY!)

Sharing other People’s Content

One of the important things to do on Facebook and Twitter, that you don’t do so much of on Instagram, is to regularly share other people’s content. This helps build relationships, show your credibility and means you are not all “me, me, me”.

For service based businesses like myself, this is typically articles from other people and the occasional video or image post.

For other businesses, maybe you want to share some virals or memes.

It used to be that this would take me F-O-R-E-V-E-R : Going to each of my favourite blogs and news websites one by one and copy & pasting the link into a social media schedule.

Or scouring other Facebook Pages or Twitter Feeds for content I can share.

Step in SmarterQueue’s content curation feature and this has significantly reduced the time spent on this from hours to perhaps half an hour a month!

To do this, all you need to do is go to their “Add Content” > “Find Content” screen.

Here you can type in (and save) any website address, RSS feed, Facebook Page or Twitter Feed and then it will show you a preview of all their most recent posts. Simply “save source” to be able to come back to it time and time again.

Then it is just a matter of adding a category for “Curated Content”, putting timeslots for this in your Schedule and adding any posts you love to this queue (making sure you mark it as “use once”).

And, bonus, you don’t need to worry if you add multiple posts from one person at once because you can simply go to the category when you have finished and shuffle the queue to switch up the order.

 

Hopefully, you can now see why I love this tool so much. It has saved me so much time each and every week establishing a baseline presence on all my social media accounts so that now I can just add extra value or focus on connecting with others, instead of the fatigue of manually scheduling.

This is one of the few products I am a proud referrer but only because it has helped me so much. So if you are interested in giving it a try for 30 days instead of the usual 14, use this link.