In Part One I gave you the apps and services you need to achieve this. In this post I’ll lay out what you need to do in other to increase your social media presence and digital footprint. Implementing the steps below will also give you more insight into new stories as they break which you can subsequently share.
Buffer
Create your account and subscribe to the Awesome Plan ($10 a month). You will also need to add your Twitter account. You might want to add some feeds to your account too, just click on the Content tab and you’ll find a section that allows you to do this:
One of the great things about Buffer is that you can schedule the delivery of your content, it had loads of other great features so take the time to get familiar with it.
Feedly
Login to Feedly with your Twitter account and subscribe to their Professional Plan which costs $5.41 per month. Doing this allows you to get news stories quicker, share to other platforms such as LinkedIn, Hootsuite and Buffer as well as pushing content to IFTTT (which is the feature that we’re interested in).
When you have your subscription setup, start to search for content channels that you are interested in or that your readers would like and add these:
You’re list on the left navigation bar will grow and you can categorise these content channels if you wish.
When you’ve got to this point you should download the Feedly app for your smartphone, you can find that here:
If This Then That (IFTTT)
Create and account and login into IFTTT, you’ll also have to add your Twitter account to this service and link it. When you’ve done this we can then create what’s called Recipe to connect the services we’ve just setup and configured earlier.
Click on Create a Recipe:
The Recipe that we’re interested in is the following:
Follow the on screen prompts in IFTTT that allow you to create the “Automatically Buffer the articles you ‘save for later in Feedly’ “.
*Note – Select Feedly as part of the IF condition, and Buffer to form the THEN part.
We’re done
When you’ve done this everything will be setup! All you need to do now is launch the Feedly app from your smartphone and as we’ve previously configured content channels in the Feedly website, the smartphone app will start to load this content.
The Magic
Now as you look through the articles in the Feedly app and see content that you like, tap and hold for a couple of seconds, you’ll get a notification “Saved”.
The IFTTT Recipe that we setup then identifies these articles and passes them onto Buffer which in turn will schedule them to be posted onto your Twitter feed.
My Results
So here are the results of implementing this for the past three months:
At the time of writing, I am a little over half way through April, the spike between February and March is massive.
Final Thoughts
By implementing these steps and using the platforms I’ve discussed I’ve been able to keep up-to-date on emerging trends or news stories that I’m interested in and being able to share this content has resulted in an increased Twitter following.
If you need any help or want me to go into more detail then drop me a message, alternatively if you have any other ideas or suggestions then please let me know.
Do you have any tips like this? Or have you implemented something similar? I’d be keen to hear.
Leave a Reply