Feature: Social Automation

Describes the Automation feature and how to configure it

João Romão avatar
Written by João Romão
Updated over a week ago

The Social Automation feature has the primary goal to help professionals save time that is needed to plan and make the most out of social media.

By automating the process of publishing content to social media, you can make sure that only your best performing content is being redistributed at the best time for maximum ROI.

You can have multiple concurrent rules for automation. Rules are automation settings that trigger a post on a Facebook Page.

Selecting a page to post to

Tailored for multi-brand companies, the Social Page Settings allows for selection of multiple Facebook Pages to post to. It's useful for cross post strategies.

Avoiding that old pages/articles get automated

  • Ignoring old content will allow you to define a specific date and block from automation any content that has either a published-date tag or entered our database records before the specified date.

  • Ignoring content already present in a Facebook Page will do a double verification to check whether a specific page/article was already posted on your Facebook Page.

Activating automation only for specific pages

Allows automating content based on its URL structure, with options to Include and Exclude paths. A user may exclude content from the /travel section to be automated, for example.

Automating content based on specific meta tags

Allows automating content based on its URL meta tags (name & property types). A user may automate only content from author “John Doe”, for example.

You can also use custom meta tags. Imagine that your run website XYZ and you've always used the tag "XYZ_author" to identify the author of an article. Your settings would look like this:

Defining which pages/articles should be automated

You may select custom triggers based on time and engagement. 

For example, you can automate any content that enters the Top 5 most shared.

As another example, you can automate any content that gets more than 50 shares AND more than 100 referrals.

Defining when automated pages/articles should be posted

GetSocial provides two distinct automation triggers:

  • Automatic: where we'll post the best content at the best time for you;

  • Custom: where we'll help you automate and schedule posts based on specific criteria;

If you choose Automatic, you'll be asked to define:

  • Frequency: how many posts you want made in a specific time window;

  • Window: when do you want automation to work (e.g. from 10AM to 4PM);

  • Calendar: in which days should that frequency/window work in;

If you choose Custom, you'll have more flexibility to define when an article should be automatically posted.

First of all, you can tailor your settings towards two dimensions: Time & Engagement.

This means that you can set up rules based on the engagement your content had over a specific period of time.

Time dimension covers:

  • Daily, Weekly & Monthly visits;

Whereas engagement dimension covers:

  • Shares

  • Referrals

  • Share Rate

  • Virality Score

Combine the two of them, and you can come up with a query like: "Automate any article with more than 10,000 visits this week and more than 1,000 shares on Facebook or 500 shares on Twitter."

On the custom triggering option, you may also choose from three delivery settings:

(1) publish posts as soon as their conditions are triggered (now)

(2) publish posts x hours/days after conditions are triggered (intervaled scheduler)

(3) publish posts on specific timeslots (as on the Automatic mode)

Select (2) with a value of 4 hours and you'll end up with the query: "Automate any article with more than 10,000 visits this week and more than 1,000 shares on Facebook or 500 shares on Twitter, 4 hours after the conditions are met"

If you want to read more about the use cases of this feature, please read our article on Social Automation Use Cases.

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