Nelio Content 3.0 – Automation Groups and plenty of new features and improvements

Nelio Content 3.0 is our most ambitious release since we first launched it back in 2016. Automation Groups completely redefine its social media capabilities, giving you full control on what can be shared where and how. Keep reading to know more about them!

Automation Groups – A Game Changer

Social Automations empower you to customize the frequency, timing, social accounts, and templates Nelio Content will use to automatically share your content on social media. This complete redesign of automations will make your blog promoting easier and more effective.

After talking to several of our customers, we identified the following problems with previous iterations of our plugin:

1. The Fallback Template could not be removed and, therefore, it was always possible to generate messages with it.
2. Even though one could easily generate specific templates per post type and category, it was not possible to group them together and enable/disable them when needed.
3. Default reshare period was a global setting and was not possible to use different reshare periods per post type and/or category.
4. Templates were lacking some options that, when creating a social message, a user could set. For instance, the type of template or its availability.

So let’s take a closer look at how Social Automations work and how they fix all the previous problems. But first…

Upgrading from Previous Versions?

If you’re coming from a previous version of Nelio Content and you’re considering upgrading, you might be wondering what happens to your already existing templates and settings. Well, worry not – we got you covered.

Social Automations comes with a preset automation group named Universal Group. This automation group will target all your website’s content and will also contain all the templates you used to have.

It basically offers the same settings you’re already familiar with, but with a revamped user interface:

1. In the Universal Group settings you’ll find a Publication Date setting. You can use it to specify how old a blog post (or any other content) can be for it to be automatically reshared. If it’s older, our plugin will simply ignore it. This setting used to be in the Advanced tab.
2. For each profile you enable, you’ll be able to specify its publication and reshare templates (both per profile or per network). In prior versions, these templates used to be available under a Templates tab in the plugin’s Settings screen, but it’s now unified under Automations.
3. Finally, you’ll also find that, within each profile you enable in a group, there’s a setting to customize its publication and reshare frequencies (that is, how many messages of each type our plugin can create using that profile). These settings used to be placed under the Social Profiles tab, but some of our users let us know that it’d make more sense if they’re in the Automations tab.

Improving Automations

So, how do Social Automations fix the problems we were discussing earlier? Well, it’s actually pretty simple: each automation group you add (other than the Univeral Group) targets some specific content of your website:

For example, in the previous screenshot, we have an automation group that targets Posts by one author in particular (Ruth) that are categorized as Business and have at least one of the following tags: Business cases, Customers, or Interview. Moreover, it’ll only share posts that have been published during the last month – if a post is older, this group will no longer reshare it.

Then, for each automation group, you can specify the specific social profiles that can and will be used to share its posts. And then, everything is quite similar to what you’re already familiar with: for each profile, you can define its publication and reshare templates.

What’s interesting about the “new” templates is that they now have an Additional Options section that, when expanded, allow you to customize all the fields that you were missing in prior versions. For example, in the previous screenshot you can see that this template can only be used on the same day as the related post is published and the user is now selecting a specific time within that day.

Finally, if you want to temporarily deactivate a specific group, you can easily do so. Just disable the toggle that’s visible in its upper left corner and no more social messages will be generated by this group. And once you’re done and you want the group to be live again, simply reactivate the toggle and our plugin will know the group is active and, therefore, it’ll use it accordingly.

If you want to know more about automation groups and how to work with them, check out our knowledge base.

Nelio A/B Testing

I was very impressed by the quality of this plugin, how easy it was to set up, and the outstanding support Nelio provides. I highly recommend Nelio A/B Testing.

Josette Millar

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Additional Updates

Moreover, Nelio Content 3.0 and its minor revisions includes the following improvements:

• Add button to copy “Support Key” on the account page.
• Add publication/reshare icons in profile list to signal which profiles have automations.
• Show available templates in message editor even if there’s no related post.
• Rename “Twitter” as “X” in the Nelio Content’s UI.
• Tweak task editor in post and calendar screens to allow edition of existing tasks.
• Add pagination to template lists to improve UX.
• Tweak external featured image’s URL regex to accept URLs with a port number in it.
• Move automation frequencies from Social Profiles to Automations tab.
• Move automation controls from Social Profiles to Automations tab.
• Redesign warning message to let users know they can’t add more automation groups.
• Add warning message on automations screen if user is about to leave with unsaved changes.
• Show tests from Nelio A/B Testing on the editorial calendar.
• Tweak Universal Group description to better explain the content it applies to.
• Update Twitter’s logo to X.
• Delay API REST call to load posts in post list until user clicks on “Share on social media.”

and several fixes:

• Template should be saveable after fixing missing bug, term, etc.
• Disable “Save Changes” button in Automations settings after successful update.
• Enable profile reshare when toggling setting in Automation Groups.
• Update walkthroughs in Social Profiles and Automations settings screens to match update 3.0.4.
• Message count estimates should update when enabling/disabling automation groups.
• Register ncshare format sooner to let Gutenberg know about it.
• Fix bug when creating hashtags from tags.
• Fix inconsistent “message too long” error message when it’s not.
• Fix post creation/edition error: empty taxonomies should be allowed.
• Fix loading of auto share end mode.
• Fix duplicated internal and external events.
• Fix post type of social templates not in a universal group.
• Fix NumberControl component to properly detect invalid values.
• Fix message length computation in preview to properly display tags.
• Update text domain in a few strings to nelio-content.
• Use “view” context in /wp/v2/author API REST request to prevent 401 error.
• Import template author correctly.
• Cache authors and terms used in Automations tab to speed up screen loading time.
• Fix “managed post types” link in universal group.
• Fix time selector in social template editor.

Featured Image by Dmitriy Demidov on Unsplash.