#Content, #content, #content. Whether you’re posting on behalf of a client or even managing your own social pages, the majority of your time is going to be spent finding relevant content to post out to your social channels.
Good content starts a conversation, leads to engagement and ultimately makes your business more profitable (the cornerstone of why we invest in content marketing). Bad content or -even worse- no content at all, can leave you with little to no audience and can potentially hinder your business.
So what do we consider ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ content?
Well, we’ve written a number of articles on is good content, on how to publish your content on the various social media platforms and how to maximize your engagement. Today we want to assure you that finding good content doesn’t need to be a chore. It doesn’t even need to take longer than five minutes for you to have good content automatically added to your social channels.
So, how do you set this up? Well, first you’ll need to find some RSS Feeds.
RSS (Rich Site Summary) Feeds were popular before social media really gained ground. Designed so that people could easily keep up to date with their favourite sites, the news, etc., these days we generally use them to follow social feeds instead. This doesn’t mean that RSS Feeds can’t still be incredibly useful for real content, and most sites still provide and actively update their RSS Feeds.
How does this help in terms of content? Well, you can easily add varied yet still relevant content to your social channels. This ensures that you keep your current followers engaged and helps grow your fan base.
So, for example, let’s say I run a clothing site. Obviously, I want to let my followers know about our latest deals, great new items coming into stock, discounts, etc. But if I’m constantly trying to ‘sell’ to my audience, I run the risk of boring (or annoying them!) and ultimately I could lose them. Why? Simply because I am giving the impression that, rather than valuing them as an overall person, I’m only interested in the money they can spend.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, I want to get my followers talking about the latest trends and how the clothes I’m selling actually help them achieve the trendy looks. Taking into account that my main customers are women between the ages of 25 – 45 who tend to like a more classic style, I want to look for a site that reflects this. Knowing this leads me to the RSS Feed for Marie Clare. If I wasn’t sure which site I wanted an RSS Feed for, I could also use specific sites built for searching for RSS Feeds. http://ctrlq.org/rss/ is such a site, and would allow me to also search for a feed by topic.
Once I have my RSS Feed (from a feed site or from plugging in ‘Marie Clare’ and ‘RSS’ into a search engine), I can use Sendible’s RSS Autoposter service. What does this mean? Basically, I add that specific RSS Feed to my Sendible account and every time a new article is added to the Marie Clare site, it is automatically posted to my social channels, thanks to the RSS Feed.
And I can even customize the articles in the feed:
- I can specify no competitor brand mentions
- Select specific terms such as ‘Trends’ only (i.e. only articles from the feed with this specific term in it
- Add a hashtag, link or similar to the beginning or end of the post so that it looks like it’s an article that I’ve specifically handpicked for my audience
If Autoposter leaves you feeling a bit out of control, or you want to be able to easily check updates and send out a post from time to time, you can easily check the updates to the RSS Feed and select updates to post out right from the Compose Box.
It may seem a little complicated at first but you’ll get the hang of it in no time with the help of these easy to use guides:
- How Do I Set Up RSS Feeds And RSS Auto Posters?
- Where Can I Check Updates To An RSS Feed?
- How do I setup Google Alert Feeds for Monitoring?
And it doesn’t have to stop there. You can set up multiple RSS Feeds and RSS Auto-posters so that you have a great range of varied content posted for you with little to no effort on your part. Follow this up with direct engagement with your followers and you’ve got a recipe for success.
