Be Efficient Promoting Your Blog with Just a Few Clicks

Translated by Núria Adell.

After working really hard you’ve finally created a blog with exceptional content that, without a doubt, will make your readers fall in love. Congratulations! You’ve done the hardest part of the job. But now you have a small problem: you can’t reach the audience you want. If your content is of high quality and you continue to publish regularly, Google will gradually improve the positioning of your publications. But if you want a good boost to increase visits to your website, you have several alternatives, and promoting your content on social networks can make a big difference.

Nowadays a company or blogger that doesn’t have an account on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, or Pinterest, gives an unprofessional image of being stuck in the stone age. So, you know, take advantage of all the extra hours you’ve got and start creating as many social media marketing campaigns as you can.?

The truth is that publishing regularly on all social networks takes up many hours of dedication and one often wonders if they’re really worth it. We believe in the benefit of social media, but not at any cost. This is exactly why at Nelio we knew that we needed a tool that would allow us to be very efficient in this regard and could save us a lot of time. This was and continues to be our main motivation behind the development of Nelio Content.

Social Automations

Nelio Content was born with the aim of simplifying the work for our blog. Among its many features, it’s worth highlighting the editorial calendar, where we organize our content, the quality control of posts, and the creation and planning of messages in social media. Since its launch, we’ve been improving the product by adding features that were either missing or were suggested by users. The truth is we’re delighted with the amount of time we save writing, ensuring quality, and promoting our content. But since we’re a team that’s always looking for more, the following challenge arose: what if social messages were created and planned by themselves? A very nice dream… but it’s clear that automatically generating messages isn’t simple.

These are some of the doubts that we raised, anticipating the difficulties to overcome:

• When and how many messages should ideally be published in each social network?
• How does one generate the content on social messages? Is it sufficient with the title and link to the post?
• What if there are posts that you don’t want to be promoted again in the future in social networks?
• Do you want to automatically post social messages on all social profiles?

And I could add many more! Remember that we’re a team of computer engineers, so you can imagine the amount of the scenarios and solutions that crossed our minds: user interface, details of implementation, use of resources, parameterization and configuration…

Luckily, from the moment we had the idea of creating Nelio Content, we also decided that our priority would always be to simplify the user’s life and never complicate it. This meant that the option of creating a tool with a lot of crazy features and a thousand configuration options was off the table. Our goal was, is, and will be to create a simple tool that, once installed, it practically works by itself.

Keeping this in mind, we created the add-on of Social Automations for Nelio Content that basically allows you to automatically generate social messages that will promote your blog.

This way, after writing a new post and with one single click, Nelio Content is in charge of planning all your promotion on social networks. In other words, it automatically creates the queue of messages that will be published on each of your social profiles without having to worry about anything else. The amount of time it saves is amazing!

In addition, the promotion of new content is complemented by the automatic sharing of old content of your blog. Thus, the editorial calendar is automatically filled with social messages that will provide a second life to your best old posts.

As you can imagine, an automatic tool should be able to adapt to the needs of the user, or else we’d risk creating something that nobody wants. In our case, we’ve decided to offer the simplest configuration options possible (though powerful at the same time) . In Nelio Content with Social Automations you can configure:

• what social profiles can be used to share content automatically,
• how often messages should be automatically posted, and
• what templates you want to generate messages automatically.

But, hey, if you don’t want to customize anything, the configuration that we provide by default works great ?.

Social messages

Looking for continuous improvement, we’re aware that it’s awesome that the automations save a lot of time and money, but they also have the risk of making your followers unfollow you if they feel your social messages are just robot publications. This is something that must be avoided at all costs! You want to save time, but you also want to be the one dealing with people and ensure they know you’re the one behind all the messages. How can you automatically create personalized messages?

Nelio Content

I’m so happy about Nelio Content that I will sound like a payed advocate… but here’s why you’ll love it: it works as promised, its auto-scheduling feature is top-notch, Nelio’s value for money is unmatched, and the support team feels like your own.

Panozk

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Templates

On the one hand, we allow each user to define, for each social profile, message templates. A social template includes the pattern that the social message will have. For example, if one of your social profiles includes a social template like this one:

• Check out @davilera’s new post:{title} {permalink} ? #awesome

Social Automations will be able to generate the following social message:

Extraction of phrases

Even though having templates is very useful, in the end you have a limited amount of templates and so their use may end up being repetitive. To solve this problem, we added an intelligent algorithm in the automatic generation of messages that extracts relevant phrases from the text of your post.

For example, in the post you’re reading right now, the automatic generation of messages has created one with the phrase “How can you automatically create personalized messages?”, which our algorithm has considered relevant within the content. Not bad, right?

In any case, we must to take into account that the automatic extraction of relevant phrases doesn’t always provide optimum results. Sometimes, it takes out phrases that don’t quite fit well in a tweet or in a Facebook post. Therefore, in order to make sure you don’t post phrases that don’t make sense, we’ve added an icon that tells you what messages have been extracted directly from the content of the post so you can review whether they make sense or not:

The image above shows two automatically generated messages (in italics) from the contents of this post. The first is a tweet that contains a sentence extracted from the content of this post. It includes a red icon so you can easily identify it as a “self-extracted phrase” and modify it if you think it’s necessary. The second tweet was generated from a template of David’s Twitter social profile.

Autoshare

In order to continuously improve how social messages are shared efficiently while still being fully personalized, we’ve developed the auto-share feature. You might already be familiar with the feature that allows you to select a fragment of the text of your post and creates a social message with it.

Well, now, after writing your post, you can directly select all the phrases that you want to share in social networks to promote it:

While you write a post, or at the time of reviewing it once it’s written, it won’t cost you anything to select and mark the fragments you want to automatically share. Since they’re fragments extracted directly from the content, you know the automatic messages will be relevant and varied:

The previous image shows a few messages that were automatically generated with the Social Automation add-on. The content of the messages are fragments that we selected ourselves. Easy peasy!

Mentions on Twitter

Hold on, there’s still more! The automatic message generation algorithm includes an extra feature: if one of the selected phrases includes a link to an external reference, Nelio Content adds a Twitter mention to the author of that reference! This is very useful to make the authors of the articles you mention in your blog know you’re doing so and allowing them to retweet the message that points to your blog. What better way to reach a wider audience than taking full advantage of Twitter?

In short, with Social Automations you can automatically generate messages with personalized phrases that share the main ideas of your post and mention your references in the tweets. We’re delighted with the add-on, but we’d like to know your opinion. What do you think about it?

Featured Image by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash