Social Automations is a feature that automates the process of creating social messages to promote your content on social media. They help you to (a) promote new content at the time of its publication and the upcoming days and hours by automatically generating a timeline of social messages, and (b) reshare old content.
You can always create social messages manually every time you write a new blog post and/or every time you want to reshare old content with your followers—but Nelio Content with Social Automations takes away all the hard work from you and eases an otherwise complex and time-consuming process.
(a) Publication Messages – Automatic Timeline Generation
After publishing a new post on your blog, Nelio Content can automatically share it on your social media accounts so that your followers know about it. To do so, Nelio Content adds a section at the end of each post, named Social Media, which contains a timeline with the social messages so you can schedule the promotion of that post on all your profiles.
By default, and assuming you have an active subscription to our service, Nelio Content will automatically generate one social message per profile (with enabled social publications) when publishing the post using only Social Publication templates, assuming you have not already scheduled any message for it explicitly (manually or automaticall, as explained below). These automatic messages will not appear in the editorial calendar until the post is published.
Alternatively, you can generate a full timeline of social messages to promote the post during the subsequent hours and days, thus reaching a broader audience and making sure nobody misses your content. Just click on the Customize Timeline button (see picture above) and Nelio Content will fill the timeline for you.
In case you have already created any social messages (personalized or automated), click on the Regenerate Timeline button (see image below) to have Nelio Content generate or regenerate all automatic social messages while keeping any personalized social messages you have previously created.
The message generation algorithm to populate a post’s promotion timeline may obtain content from different sources:
- Relevant sentences. Nelio Content analyzes your post content and extracts the relevant sentences included in there. These sentences are then used to create multiple messages that perfectly capture the essence of your content, without using any template.
- Social Highlights. You can also manually highlight the most relevant sentences from your content and Nelio Content will use them in the social messages it creates.
- Social Templates: Nelio Content comes with a predefined set of social templates that will be used to generate automatic social messages, along with the templates that you have defined for them, and
- Customized sentences. You can specify custom phrases in any post as an additional source for the creation of social messages.
Once the messages are generated, we recommend that you review and tweak them as you please. This way, you’ll be sure that the promotion of your post is exactly as you want it to be.
This type of messages are only used at the exact time a post is newly published and during the subsequent hours/days. When a post is one month old or older, then Reshare Messages are used instead.
(b) Reshare Messages
Reshare messages are used for resharing old content with your followers. They are automatically created using a WordPress CRON job and guarantee that your social accounts are always filled with relevant links to your blog. This is how your editorial calendar might look like if you enable social resharing:
Some reshare messages might be automatically created when you fill the timeline of newly written posts (as described in the section above). However, most of these messages are usually created when needed—that is, when your social accounts are “empty”. Nelio’s resharing algorithm will create multiple social messages using the templates you define in the Settings screen. Nelio’s resharing algorithm will select which posts should be reshared based on different criteria:
- Sharing settings that you have indicated for every post as previously described.
- Traffic acquisition. The more traffic the post generates, the most likely it’ll be reshared.
- Age. Newest post are more likely to be shared than older content. But old posts will still have a chance to get reshared.
- Manual overwrites. If you tell Nelio not to share a specific post, it won’t reshare it automatically.
Initial Settings & Customizing Automatic Messages
To start Social Automations, just go to Nelio Content » Settings and in the Social Profiles tab connect which social profiles can be used for sharing automatic messages.
The goal of Nelio Content’s Automations is to make your life easier, not more complicated. That’s why you won’t find complex settings for tweaking how Social Automations behave. However, there are several ways to customize automations at a global level to tweak the following simple aspects:
- What custom post types do you want to integrate with Nelio Content.
- What do you want the default behaviour to be regarding automations (include or exclude all posts, unless you indicate otherwise, or stop sharing content after a period of time).
- Which Social Profiles should contain automatically-generated social messages.
- How often should Nelio Content publish messages without your doing anything.
- Which Social Templates will be used for generating social messages.
You can also customize what automation sources do you want Nelio Content use for the promotion of every specific post.
