It’s no surprise if you’ve looked into traditional publishing that writers are required (read that word again) to have a social media platform before you will be considered for a contract. So we trudge along to Twitter and Facebook to set up our profiles.
But endlessly posting to these services chews up valuable time best spent writing. So we look into content curating services like Buffer and Hootsuite, trying to find the best match.
Most services offer too few posts on a free plan and some – like CoSchedule – require too high a monthly commitment for unsigned writers to afford.
So I looked around for a service that offered the most free posts at one time for free. Hootsuite was my choice for a while, but they began to remove services from their free plan and make them premium only. That becomes a “you” problem, not a “Me” problem. Never offer something for free then make it premium – that shows a lack of proper planning prior to launch. As a result, I swore off Hootsuite. Now I get these “We miss you” emails.
I saw a link to Recurpost as a curating service. 100 posts at one time for free. Hm. And $20 a month if you go premium for 1000 posts. Interesting.
Except the deal keeps getting better. Recurpost allows you to schedule not only the initial post, but within that post, variations (some can be automatically generated).
I signed up, and set out to schedule content. It took a little bit to figure it out. First, you have to set up a library. That’s easy, they give you four example libraries (other people’s content, quotes, Twitter, Linkedin). Perfect!
Next, you’ll need to set up schedules. Think “how many times a day do I want to post?” I chose seven tweets a day, so you need seven schedules for Sunday, seven for Monday, etc. Recurpost lets you choose “Best time” as an option, so do that. It takes maybe half an hour to set up schedules (you need seven for LinkedIn – one per day).
Here’s the tricky part – writing all those tweets. Just go into your Twitter library, and click “Recurring updates”. Don’t worry about them repeating – Recurpost has it set for Twitter not to repeat. For Linkedin, I’d use “one offs” to store for those, or it will keep repeating over and over again until you stop it.
Recurpost is also linked with Pexels, so you have access to all their stock photographs for your tweets.
Don’t try to schedule all 100 posts at once – I’d split them up. For instance, my “Quotes” and my “other people’s content” libraries are twice a month each, so ten in each means you have five months worth. You now can schedule a lot of tweets! I keep about 65 tweets scheduled. It usually takes Recurpost about a month to figure out what times people interact with your content, so you want to start now.
Material Disclaimer – I do not get paid for promoting Recurpost. Nor do I get any consideration towards a free plan in response for promoting them. They’ve asked me for the right to use my endorsement of their service, but I’ve yet to see myself on their website.
Conclusion
I truly recommend Recurpost over Buffer, Hootsuite or CoSchedule. Make the switch – you’ll be happy you did.
