Social Templates are text patterns used by nelio Content with Social Automations for generating social messages automatically. Social templates can be created for each social profile you have included in an automation group and you can specify a set of options on what content, how and when they should be applied to.
By default, when you include a social profile in an automation group, it already includes three publishing and re-sharing templates. Click on the publish or re-share icon at the top right of any social profile to display the respective templates:
To add a new template, click the Add Template button and the following dialog will open:
Here you have a field for you to type the message pattern you want to be applied to the template. Below this you have options and additional conditions for creating custom text patterns.
Writing Pattern
The writing pattern of a template contains text, emojis and/or placeholders. Start typing the text in the text box and add the placeholders you think you need.
The image above shows a set of writing patterns from various social templates created for an X profile.
Placeholders
Placeholders are portions of a template that will be replaced with the appropriate value when the message is actually instantiated. You can use the Add placeholder icon on the right below the text box to see what placeholders you have available.
For example, in a group of post automations like the one shown in the image above, you have the following placeholders:
{title}: the title of the post associated with the automatically created social message.{phrase}: add a phrase extracted from the content.{highlight}: add a sentence that has been flagged from the content or added at the end of the content as relevant to share.{author}: the name of the author of the post.{excerpt}: the excerpt of the post associated with the automatically created social message.{permalink}: the link to the post associated with the automatically created social message.{categories}: categories to which the post belongs.{tags}: tags used in the post associated with the automatically created social message.
Note that depending on the plan you are using and the type of content added in the automation group, you will have different placeholders. For example, if you are creating a template for pages, you will not be able to use {tags} or {categories} because pages, in principle, do not support them.
Network Social Template
To simplify the work of creating templates, when creating a template you have the option to indicate whether it is a network template. This means that the template applies to all the social profiles of the same network in which you are creating the template.
To do this, just click on the social network icon below the text box to create the same template for all the profiles of the same network.
Additional Options
By clicking on Additional options you can select from different options on what content, how and when to apply the template to:
- Taxonomies: filter the content to which to apply the template by selecting from the different taxonomies that are available in the selected content type.
For example, in the posts and products you can filter the content by selecting the categories and tags you want.
- Author: filter by the author of the content you want the template to apply to.
- Availability: filter by the date and time of availability of a template.
For the templates used for the generation of the publishing timeline, you can choose how long a template should be available after publishing new content (only at the time of publishing, or a certain number of hours or days).
For templates used for generating social messages to re-share old content, you can select the days of the week and the time slot in which you want that template to be available.
- Use of images: additionally you can indicate if Nelio Content can generate some messages with images extracted from the content to share (default option), or not add images to the generated messages or only use that template in case it can extract some images from the content to share.
Once you have completed the necessary information for your template, click the Save button to have it saved and listed. Don’t forget to save your changes once you are done.