Years after chasing behind the Search Engine traffic and crying about why my blog isn’t getting any traffic, it changed the shift to social media and I can only say why I didn’t do this earlier.
I mean I know there are a billion people hanging on Facebook every day and if I can drive 0.0001% of it to my sites will mean business for me. Right?
Wrong.
A billion people’s on Facebook might be cool, there’s are millions or businesses already trying hard on the platforms.
And to compete with them and reach people, you’ll need a social media strategy and some Godly talent of posting like crazy.
Surely, hiring a social media manager can ease the stress but talk about ROI and lonely people like me who work from their home office, it’s off the checklist.
I’m a Do it yourself types guy, who does everything on his own. I’m all about one man show and I turn to Automation tools to be efficient.
Over the years I’ve developed a workflow that lets me manage most of the work on my own.
I’ve previously shared a list of tools for managing Social Media, one of the tools I talked about was PostCron.
What exactly does PostCron Do?
PostCron is a tool that lets you post on Multiple Social Networks from One Place, you can schedule the posts, it can be a link, a photo or just a piece of text.
The premium account lets you do even more but the free account is more than enough to get started.
PostCron is actually the tool I use more frequently, because of it’s easy of use and availability of a Mobile app which lets me share something even when I am away from the PC.
So in this post, I wanted to walk you through my process of using PostCron to manage my Social Media channels.
PostCron gives you all 3 big social accounts to register in one click. The obvious choice should be Facebook for most of the people since you will be connecting your Facebook pages to PostCron anyway.
The Free vs Pain Plans
The Free account has limitations of allowing you to connect up to 6 Social Profiles, it could be a mix of Social Profiles from different networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or Pinterest.
If you want to post on Instagram, you need to be on the paid account which starts from $9.99/month ($8.33 if paid annually).
The Professional Plan, as what it is called, also lifts the limitation of adding more Social accounts, which is up to 15 and you can also schedule the unlimited number of posts, which is only up to 10 in the free plan.
We talk about other features like the Bulk Uploader and Add Watermark later in this post.
The Introductions to PostCron Dashboard
The Interface of the Dashboard of PostCron is pretty easy to use.
You can highlight the Social Account you want to post to in one click and write a post, add an image or paste a link which will automatically generate the post thumbnails like in the Facebook Publishing dashboard.
You can also group the Social Accounts to select multiple accounts in one click, like the Facebook Page, Twitter Handle & Google Plus page of one website can be put in one group to make it easy to post something across all Social networks. It’s a pretty small thing but productivity wise it saves a few seconds every time you will post something.
It’s a pretty small thing but productivity wise it saves a few seconds every time you will post something.
One click reveals the Schedule, Post Now and Predefined Publishing Times options, which is the most used feature by me. I have predefined the publishing time for each of my Social accounts, like 4 times a day,
I have predefined the publishing time for each of my Social accounts, like 4 times a day, 9 AM, 12 PM, 6 PM and 9 PM. Now, I just have to add something, select the Social accounts and select the Predefined Publishing Times option, no manual calculations every time to schedule the posts.
The free account doesn’t let you use this feature much aggressively since you can only schedule up to 10 posts, but imagine the amount of time it is going to save with unlimited pending posts available on the Professional plan.
I don’t use the bulk uploader much because I seriously didn’t get much time to understand how it works since the Predefined Posts is sufficient for my workflow.
Feeding Images to the Facebook Algorithm using PostCron
You may be aware of the recent changes in the algorithms of Facebook which now favours visual content more than written. In plain English, an Image will reach more people than a piece of text.
I am a fan of creating in bulk because it saves time, that why I sit down and created dozens of images using Canva, an amazing tool for creating stunning graphics. But the problem lies in posting them on Facebook, and PostCron takes care of this pretty well.
I add all the images to PostCron which gives an upload to either post them together or as separate posts. It also lets me add Captions to each of the images from a single page (a bit time saver) and then use the Predefined Publish Timings feature makes sure all these images are posted on a regular interval of time.
This is something that will take much time & energy if done manually.
Note: Posting on Facebook Pages on a regular basis also improves your reach since according to Facebook Algorithm your page is active and you are serious about it :-)
Clever Settings for Individual Social Media Accounts
Talking about images, another clever feature that saves plenty of time is the ability to add watermarks to the images. From the Social Meda Account section,s you can control each Social Account, where you can set the predefined publishing timings, Watermarks and Short URLs.
Predefined Publishing Timings
to get the maximum engagement on your posts, you need to make sure you post the something on your social accounts when it can reach maximum people.
With PostCron, you can precisely post content to your social accounts by choosing the time throughout the week. I post 4 times a day on one of my social accounts.
Watermarks
Your created images can easily be picked up by other Social accounts who will reupload it as their own, meaning your efforts will help them gain engagement.
Watermarks help you minimise this as a lot of those pirate social accounts that live on other people’s content will note post images with other people’s watermark.
PostCron gives an easy option to add watermarks to the images by default. You can choose the positioning, size and transparency level of the watermark.
URL Shortener
the URL Shortners give you that extra edge on the branding part, with long URLs turning into recognisable short domains can increase the clicks on the links.
Note: You can configure your custom URL shortener using Bitly.com, You can use a domai.nr to find a perfect short domain to use as a URL Shortner.
You can set the URL shortener in PostCron, and then whatever link to paste in the Publishing Dashboard, will turn into a Short URL for that particular Social Account.
Reusing the Past Published Posts
I’ve got a tip for you, if you want your posts to reach maximum people, share it multiple times, probably at different times.
I am using PostCron for this. On the PostCron Dashboard, you simply click on ‘pastPosts’ and all the previous posts that were published using PostCron would appear, which can be reported in a single click.
I am using the Mobile App, which lets me do this on the ago so that I can still call it I’m working’ while standing in a long queue in the back or at a shopping mall.
These are tonnes of features in a single service, It’s literally a universal Dashboard for all your Social Media channels. It saves me from opening almost 10 tabs in Google Chrome.
I try avoiding Facebook as much as I can and try using PostCron for posting everything because once you are in Facebook, you will be an endless loop of Memes, Videos and Viral stories, which is a bit unproductive as a Creator.
So, say yes to PostCron to stay productive and do more in less time. PostCron is free to use but if you’ve got a dozen of Social Account to manage and want the Unlimited posting feature, the Professional plan is best suited for you.
You can even get 1 month free if you signup via this link.
