How To Save Time And Rock Social Sharing

Sharing posts on social media is a fundamental part of marketing a website. However, social sharing also tends to be very time consuming. Luckily, there are some awesome tools available that can save you time.

How The Pros Do It

From watching awesome influencers such as Pat Flynn, Kim Garst, and Jeff Bullas I figured out what most people like to see, and I learned a lot.

For example:

• Pat Flynn tends to engage with his audience heavily, posts quotes, and tweets things as they happen.
• Kim Garst does a great job of tweeting very inspirational quotes.
• Jeff Bullas frequently shares links to super helpful articles on his website.

Social Sharing Best Practices

I also read up on best practices. Kevan Lee at Buffer posted a great article about the art of self-promotion on social media. In it, he discusses 6 popular sharing ratios, such as 5–3–2, 4–1–1, 555+, Rule of Thirds, Golden Ratio, and the 20-to-1 rule.

After reading this, I realized no one really had a perfect method for social sharing. The best way to share on social media and interact with followers varied from person to person, and audience to audience.

What I Try To Provide

I sat down and thought hard about what I wanted to provide for my audience, which is you! I want to give you the best value possible. I want to be the one-stop-shop for all of your website marketing and promotion needs.

I knew I wanted to share what I have on my blog, but I didn’t have enough content on my blog to possibly fill every need. There are tons of new tips and tricks coming out constanly. With a 9–5 job, there is just no way I can keep up. Also, there are tons of people posting awesome links on Twitter.

This means I have three objectives:

• Share awesome articles for my followers to read and keep informed
• Share my own articles
• Retweet and engage with my followers

My Sharing Ratio

I came up with my own plan to give my followers what I think is the best possible value. I call it the 3–1–5 ratio.

Just like the other ratios didn’t work for me, my ratio might not work for you. However, I think my reasoning behind my ratio and the tools I use to implement it might be useful for you.

If you just want to see how to use this ratio, and you don’t care about how to find and share articles super easily, you can skip to step 6 below.

My Failed Attempt (Don’t Do This)

I started out by visiting a few of the websites I liked. I reviewed the sites to see if they had posted anything new since the last time I visited.

If they had, I manually copied the headline of the article over to a new Tweet, and then copied the URL over as well. Then I added any relevant hashtags. To share my own posts, I did much the same thing, in a manual fashion.

I quickly realized this method was far too time consuming. I had spent hours sharing just a couple dozen posts.

It was at this point I realized I needed to find a way to at least partially automate my process.

I did some research and found there are tools available that completely automate social sharing. However, I didn’t want to take my evaluation and personality out of the equation. I still want to read through each article to make sure it would truly benefit anyone reading it.

Also, because this is my industry, I want to read the articles just to stay up to date. If I were to use a completely automated tool, I would miss out on that opportunity.

My Success

After trying out several different tools, I landed on a combination of Feedly and Buffer. These two tools alone make it very easy to find articles to share, then queue them up.

I still get to review every article before I share it, but the time it takes is greatly reduced. No longer am I manually copy and pasting headlines and URLs. Instead, these tools do that work for me.

Feedly is a free tool that lets you easily keep track of all the blogs you normally read. It brings all of their posts into one nice interface where you can sort through them and never miss a post.

Buffer is a fantastic social media tool. Their free plan allows you to schedule up to 10 posts, but their paid plan lets you schedule 200 and gives you some advanced filtering options.

With these two tools at my side, I can easily schedule dozens of posts in a matter of minutes.

I’m still refining my process, but what I am doing is working well. Since I started using this process in late 2014, I’ve gained over 10,000 new Twitter followers. In just the last 90 days, I’ve received over half a million tweet impressions, and my visibility is increasing daily.

Granted, I can’t attribute all of this growth to this method alone. Some of the credit has to go to Tweepi and my practice of following people who might want to follow me back. However, most of these people would not have remained followers if I did not provide quality content.

This process is easy to learn and implement and saves a ton of time once you get used to it. I encourage you to at least try it out, and feel free to switch things up to make it work better for your needs.

My Process

There are still quite a few steps to this process. This portion starts off assuming you’ve already created a Feedly account and have your blog feeds set up. In addition, I assume you’ve created a Buffer account and linked your Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+ to it. You’ll also need the Buffer extension. If you don’t have it installed, you should do that now, then come back to this post. I’m going to go through each step and explain my thought process behind them.

Note for this article: I’m going to be using Twitter as an example, but the same basic process can be used for other social networks.

1. Create A Base Social Sharing Schedule

With Buffer, you can easily set up a basic sharing schedule by navigating to the Schedule tab.

This works well if you only want to post a couple times per day. You can simply hit the big blue button to add a couple posting times. However, I’m currently posting 32 times every day, which averages out to every 45 minutes.

I post this often because the life span of a tweet is about 30 minutes. This simply means Twitter moves so fast that after 30 minutes, your tweet may as well not exist anymore. Of course, people can still see it if they directly visit your profile. But if they are only looking at their home stream, your tweet will be lost very soon.

If you want to focus on Facebook / Google+ / LinkedIn, Buffer has put together a great infographic and article. These detail how often you should post on each social network.

Just keep in mind that posting frequency recommendations tend to change frequently. Not even a year prior to the article above, Buffer posted a similar article wherein they made slightly different recommendations.

Because I post so often, I found a tool called BufferTime to help create my base posting schedule on Buffer. This tool isn’t built by Buffer themselves, but they have written about BufferTime in a blog post, so it’s safe to say they trust it.

After visiting www.bufferti.me you’ll need to link up with your Buffer account. Then you should see a screen like this:

You can then select your social network (Twitter for me), input how many minutes you want between posts (45 minutes for me), and the time range (between 12:00 AM and 12:00 AM for me). Then click Schedule. Your new schedule should automatically be added to your Buffer account and look something like this:

For myself, I like to post all 24 hours of the day. This is so I don’t miss out on the European and Asian/Australian audiences. However, if you have a local business, you may want to keep your posts to business hours.

This part is optional, but I personally don’t like for my posts to look scheduled. So I go ahead and add or subtract a few minutes to the posting times here and there. This way it looks a little more natural. For example, my first posting time might be 12:03, then 12:39, then 1:24, etc.

2. Find Articles To Share

Next, you’ll need to find awesome articles to share. You could do this by visiting your favorite websites each day and sharing new posts. However, going to each website individually takes time. So instead, I recommend using Feedly.

Once you have your Feedly account setup, you can add in the RSS URLs of any blogs you want to follow.

(Pssst…http://smartwebsitemarketing.com/feed/).

After adding in your favorite blogs, your stream should look something like this:

As you can see, I have 26 articles in my feed that I haven’t read and shared yet. At this point, I typically skim the headlines and get rid of any articles that won’t be relevant to you guys.

After I do a cursory first glance, I right click on the headlines of each article and open them in new tabs. This way I can read the full article and use the Buffer extension to share (see step 3). If you left click the articles you’ll get an abbreviated version of the article within Feedly.

Once I’ve opened the article in a new tab, I hide the article within Feedly so I don’t accidentally share the same article twice. You can do this by hovering over the article excerpt and then selecting the “hide” button:

Note: This is also how I keep my unread article count below 100, to keep from going insane…most of the time.

3. Use Buffer To Share Articles

Now that we’ve found articles to share, it’s time to actually share them! I like to read the article first, to make sure it will be valuable for my followers. There have been times where a headline seems awesome, but after actually reading the article I realize the author is just trying to sell a product. Or it’s a short blurb, linking off to another more in-depth article. In most cases, I don’t share those kinds of articles because I don’t think they’ll provide a benefit to you.

After I read the article, I like to find the author so I can credit them. Most of the time you can find their bio and a link to their Twitter @ handle at the bottom of the article. In this case, Krista added her Twitter account as a link:

To credit her, I simply right click on the link and select the “Copy Link Address” option that appears. I’ll use this later.

Then I use the Buffer extension to easily share the article. Once you have the extension installed, you should see an icon at the top right of your browser:

After you click the button, a window should pop up with the headline of the article and a link. It might have some other default text or hashtags depending on the site owner’s settings. In this case, the Buffer pop up looks like this:

Now it’s time to customize your tweet. I like to do some formatting cleanup, add the author attribution, and add my own hashtags. You can now paste the author’s link from before. It might have the full Twitter URL, so just edit it down to show their @username so that linking works properly.

After cleaning up, my Buffer pop up looks like this:

I’ve done a few things here that work well for me:

• Added hashtag to “Blog” in the original article headline to increase visibility of the tweet.
• Added “via @KristaJeanT” to give credit to the author and increase the chances of a retweet.
• Added “#blogging” as a variation to “#Blog” to increase visibility of the tweet.

These are just quick things I like to do, and depending on your niche and audience you may have varying levels of success. However, I think it’s always a good idea to try to add a least 1 hashtag and give credit to the original author.

Now just hit the “Add to Queue” button and your tweet will be added to your Buffer queue.

4. Add In Retweets

Retweets are a great way to provided added resources for your followers. They also serve the purpose of filling extra scheduled sharing slots when you can’t find enough good articles to share.

To find good retweets, I like to go directly to Twitter and do a hashtag search. Most of the time my searches revolve around the topics I blog about, such as #blogging, #socialmedia, #contentmarketing, #marketing, and others.

Once I see a tweet that looks interesting, I’ll follow the link and make sure it’s a good article, just like in step 3. Then instead of clicking the retweet button, I use the handy Buffer icon.

Then you can either hover over the tweet to change it into a quote with your own additions, or click the “Add to Queue” button and add the retweet to your Buffer queue.

Since it might be quite some time before the retweet is actually sent, I like to reserve Buffering retweets for “evergreen” content. So instead of Buffering breaking news, I’ll go ahead and simply retweet it as soon as I see it. But for tweets that will be just as relevant next week as today, I use Buffer to share them later.

5. Add Self Promotion

Finally, I promote myself! This is my last step in the Buffering process, but the most important one.

You may have noticed that for articles I add to Buffer, I don’t add images. Images have been shown to receive more retweets, so it would make sense to add images for everything.

However, adding images for every article I share would be very time consuming, even with the Buffer extension. Believe me, I tried it for a few weeks.

Not only is adding images time consuming, but it isn’t necessarily beneficial for my followers or myself. If a link interests a follower, then they can click it and learn more. It doesn’t really matter to me if someone retweets a link to another author’s article.

However, it is important for my followers to retweet links to my own content. Therefore, I make sure to add images with tweets of my own content.

To share my articles, I simply visit the post on my website. Then the Buffer extension automatically adds a handy “Share Image” button when I hover over featured images.

By using the “Share Image” button, Buffer should automatically add the image to your post. Next I clean up the formatting similarly to step 3 and add the post to my queue.

Once I’ve shared a post for the first time, I like to share it again on a cycle. This way all of my followers get a chance to see my posts.

Luckily, Buffer makes it much easier to share the same post again. And because I’ve only added images to my own posts, sorting is super easy.

Note that you will have to be on the paid $10/month Buffer plan for this part, but it’s totally worth the time savings.

Go to your Buffer account and click the Analytics tab at the top. Now click the “All Posts” button and switch it to “Image Posts”. All of your most recently shared articles should show up.

Now you can hover over the articles and click the “Re-Buffer This Post” button to add it to your queue. Nice and easy.

6. Sort Your Posts

Now that you have articles, retweets, and your own content, it’s time to organize them. No one wants to see 5 of your posts in a row, followed by 3 retweets and then 7 articles.

Instead, I like to use a 3–1–5 ratio. With this ratio, you add three articles, a retweet every 3rd article, and your own content every 5th post. I know that probably doesn’t make any sense, so I’ll try to explain it a little better.

It’s easiest for me to add all of my tweets in this order:

1. All shared articles
2. Add a retweet after every 3rd article
3. Add your own content after every 5th tweet (includes articles and retweets)

For example, in this screenshot:

1, 2, and 3 are the shared articles. A and B are retweets. And the tweets with images on the right side are my own content. So after every 3 shared articles, I have a retweet. Then after the first piece of my own content, “Not Using Meta Descriptions? I Am!”, there are 5 tweets: 2, 3, A, 1, 2. Then I share my own content again.

That probably made no sense. If so, just try it yourself, and start rearranging the posts. After moving them around a bit, you’ll get a hang of it (or maybe come up with something even better!)

I repeat this process over and over again with as much content as I have. With this ratio, there are shared articles, retweets, and my own content, all nicely spread out.

Even though my own content looks fairly close together, these are different articles, and there is actually a 4.5 hour gap between the two posts. Given that the life span of a tweet is only around 30 minutes, someone who saw my first link to my own content is very unlikely to see my second link.

This ratio also drives a good amount of traffic to my site, and I haven’t received any complaints about spamming my own content too much. Posting my own content more often could temporarily drive more traffic to my site, but I think it would be a disservice to my followers to not share other articles that cover more topics than my website provides.

Conclusion

There are many different social sharing ratios out there, but the one that works best is the one your audience likes. This can vary from audience to audience, and niche to niche.

The one thing that remains the same is that you should always look to provide more value for your audience. This could mean sharing more articles written by other authors, inspirational retweets, or your own amazing content. It doesn’t matter.

It took me several tries to find the best method for myself, which I’ve tried my hardest to explain in depth to you. Now it’s your turn. You can either take my method and use it, modify it, or throw it out and come up with your own. Whichever way you go, just make sure to always provide value to your audience. They’re following you for a reason. And don’t forget, social media is all about the social.

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Thanks!

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Originally published at smartwebsitemarketing.com on April 20, 2015.