I’m definitely not a believer in bots, or that you should solely use a scheduler for your Twitter or Facebook profile, because after all it’s about engaging not spitting out automated updates. However, sometimes automation is a great thing.
I run a website for soccer enthusiasts in Central Pennsylvania called CentralPASoccer.com and every week we there are pickup soccer matches that we want to remind people about via Twitter and Facebook. Originally we were creating a separate post each day there was pickup. Now, with Hootsuite I set up a bulk scheduler file, uploaded it to Hootsuite and chose the profile where I wanted to post the updates. And boom! No more having to remember to post the reminders and I can spend more time actually interacting with our followers.
If you’re having trouble reading the image here are the instructions in text:
Schedule multiple messages at once by using the bulk upload tool. Simply select a social profile and upload a correctly formatted .CSV file with up to 50 messages and HootSuite will deliver accordingly.
Here’s how to prepare your updates:
• – Format: DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM,”MESSAGE”,”URL”
• – All dates/times are relative to currently selected time zone
• – URLs must contain “http://”Example message: 16/11/2010 17:35,”Your message here”,”http://website.com”
• – Schedule messages at least 10 minutes from upload time
• – Assign times in 5 minute increments
• – Only one messages per time slot
• – Duplicate messages are not allowed
Like I said; I am definitely not an advocate for complete automation, but for mundane repetitive posts such as reminders, it automation is a great time saver.
