How to build a robot army: Social media automation for nonprofits
Raise your hand if keeping your social media accounts updated takes waaaaay too much time. Anyone? Yes?
Maybe you’re a one-person communications department, or maybe you simply don’t have enough time to keep the social media lights on and do all the other stuff on your list. Either way, writing tweets, posts, and other social content — while important for keeping people engaged with your organization — can be a major time suck.
Here at Hypsypops, I’m a one (wo)man band. Blog posts, marketing, contract work, and administration duties are all on me. When I started out, I would spend hours on social media. It was good for exposure and building my audience, but in the grand scheme of things it still didn’t seem like a great use of my time.
Enter the robots.
Computers were designed to do mundane things on behalf of humans, and it’s something they continue to excel at. This is one way to put that to work for you!
I discovered RecurPost a few months into entrepreneur-ing, and it has been a lifesaver. Knowing that the bot is on the job means I don’t need to spend nearly as much time on Twitter and Facebook (my two main channels).
RecurPost is great for nonprofits too. I’ve set a few nonprofits up with the service and it’s worked brilliantly, keeping the organizations’ social media lights on without taking time away from their busy staff.
And the best part? It’s FREE.
How to save time with RecurPost automation
Your average tweet has a half-life of approximately 16 minutes, according to PageModo. That means of all the people who will see your tweet, half will have done so in its first 16 minutes. After that, viewership tapers off quickly.
Any given tweet will only be read by a tiny fraction of your followers — and that means you can copy yourself and put posts on repeat without bothering anyone.
That’s where RecurPost comes in.
RecurPost is one of many social media automation services that have been popping up recently, including MeetEdgar, SmarterQueue, and other services that are basically two clever words mashed together. :)
These services recycle your evergreen content. Evergreen content includes the posts and articles that are always fresh — the ones that don’t date themselves by mentioning an event last week or a fundraiser next month. Instead, evergreen content always reflects your organization and its work.
To use RecurPost:
- Create a pool of tweets about the evergreen content on your website
- Connect RecurPost to your social media accounts
- Stand back
RecurPost will post your pre-written tweets in a randomized order at ideal times. And when it gets to the end of the list? It starts over again.
Automation helps your nonprofit’s voice shine through the social media noise
You can focus on the newest, most important messaging and news items — the bot has your older content covered.
The recycled RecurPost content creates almost a background hum, over which you can post newer content and articles to keep things fresh.
Your older content lives on.
If it’s evergreen, it’s still good. And because most of your followers don’t really hang on your every word (sorry), they probably haven’t read all of your back archives. This strategy gives them that chance!
Put your bots to work!
This is the first in a series on automation, so go ahead and hire a robot intern or five and give yourself some breathing room!
Originally published at hypsypops.com on August 23, 2017.
