When you’re running a blog, a lot of your time can be taken up by writing content, recording/editing videos and creating new graphics to go into your posts.
If you’re anything like me then you will schedule in a few posts that you’ve written in advance so that they go live over the coming weeks.
One task that I always find particularly time-consuming is sharing new posts across the blog’s different social media platforms.
This seems like something that should really be automated and it means that I can spend more time on tasks like outreach and engagement through social, rather than just logging into each of my different accounts to share my latest post.
Social Sharing via Dlvr.it
After using a variety of different tools I finally found one that would automatically share my new blog posts, whilst also giving me engagement stats on the posts as well.
This was important for me to see how my tweets/shares/+1′s performed through using the tool – this is what Dlvr.itdoes perfectly.
Using Dlvr.it, you can link up your blog’s RSS feed to your different social media accounts, including Google+ (which a lot of these services don’t allow) to automatically share your posts.
Not only does this save you time, but it also enables you to use Dlvr.it’s analytics dashboard to get some extra stats on how your posts have performed across social media.
Alongside tweeting/sharing/+1′ing your own content, you can link up a few of your favourite website’s RSS feeds to automatically share across your social media accounts – you can even ensure that you mention the blog owner in each post, add hashtags and pull in the post description as well as the URL.
I wouldn’t recommend adding too many other websites into Dlvr.it because you lose control over the content that you’re sharing – I do this for around 3/4 of my favourite blogs that consistently write great content.
It helps me to ensure that I’m still having some activity on my social media accounts when I’m busy/unavailable – it’s important that you’re also engaging with people and posting out more personalised messages though.
Setting Up Your Feeds Within Dlvr.it
Setting up your RSS feeds within Dlvr.it couldn’t be easier. The first step, once you’ve created an account on Dlvr.it, is to navigate to Deliveries>Routes.
A ‘route’ is essentially the path that your content will be distributed through. To start with, you need to add a new ‘source’ – this will be your blog’s RSS feed (or a specific category RSS feed from your blog).
You can also add an email as a source, which allows you to add in content to your ‘route’ by sending a an email to the address that Dlvr.it specifies – this is particularly handy for scheduling in new content that you have found whilst on the move.
Simply add in your RSS feed into your sources (NOTE: you can add multiple sources to the same ‘route’) and add any extra information that you want from the Dlvr.it settings.
Once you’ve done this, you can set up your ‘destinations’ (i.e the social media accounts that you will share from).
If, like me, you will share your blog articles from your blog’s Twitter as well as your personal Twitter account, then you can set up multiple accounts within your ‘destinations’. As well as Twitter, you can share automatically to the following:
- Google+
- Tumblr
- App.net
- Delicious
- StatusNet
Filtering the Content that Dlvr.it Shares
If you want to be a little more specific about the types of post that Dlvr.it shares from your feed then you can filter by post authors, categories, body content, title and URL.
This can be great if you are setting up feeds to automatically share content from external websites and you only want content from specific categories or by specific authors to be shared.
As well as this, you can set up custom tracking codes for Google Analytics in order to effectively track click-throughs/conversion, etc.
