Social Media Tips

Changes to Facebook Groups Publishing

Facebook unexpectedly decided to remove Groups API access, preventing any third-party tools, including SmarterQueue, from interacting with your Facebook Groups. After April 22nd, 2024, SmarterQueue will no longer be able to publish directly to groups you manage. You can still schedule posts for these groups, but will receive email notifications for easy manual posting instead. You may also wish to consider transitioning to a Facebook Page for better engagement.

Here are our top tips to help you improve your social media presence. We’ve kept them concise, so you can put them into practice fast, without reading lengthy blog posts.
  1. Follow the 80:20 rule – try to limit your self-promotional content to 20% of your posts; the rest should be value-add content for your audience.
  2. Make sure your post has an eye-catching image. If you’re sharing a link, you can either keep the link preview, or select an image from the page to attach instead. Or, why not try a fun gif from the integrated Giphy library?
  3. Think carefully about how you balance your content types across your Posting Plan. What will people be interested in on a Monday morning vs. a Friday afternoon? 
  4. Move your Posting Plan around every few weeks. You may not have picked the right times/days for your content, and you won’t know unless you try posting it at a different time. After a while, you’ll get a feel for when each type of content gets the most engagement. (Head to Analytics for some tips.)
  5. Use hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to help your posts get discovered. There’s evidence that engagement increases as more hashtags are added. You can save your favourite hashtags as a Snippet so you don’t need to copy/paste them each time.
  6. Speed up your workflow by filling your Queue with several posts of the same Category in one go (e.g. if you find 10 great quotes, add them all at once). They’ll get spaced apart according to your Posting Plan, and you won’t have to think about that Category for a while!
  7. Take the time to add lots of Evergreen posts to your Queue – your Queue will never run out, and if you have enough posts, they won’t be repeated for weeks.
  8. Create a post for all social networks in one go. You can tweak the text for each account, and have different images for Twitter/Instagram, as for Facebook/LinkedIn. No need to copy/paste between separate posts.
  9. Create saved Sources in ‘Find Content’ for relevant hashtags or mentions – you can regularly run the search to find new content to keep your Queue topped up with fresh posts.
  10. Set up Auto-RSS for blogs you regularly share content from – new blog posts will automatically be pulled into your Queue for sharing. You can opt to save them as drafts or be published as they are.
  11. Re-use your best past Posts. Use the Importer to find your most engaging posts, and bulk import them to your Queue.
  12. You can use Seasonal Categories for time-sensitive occasions (e.g. Christmas, events, special offers). You just need to specify the dates the Category should be active between and then you don’t need to worry about pausing or unpausing the Category.

If you have any questions you’d like answered, or tips you’d like to share, get in touch!