Do you ever feel that all the work that you put into maintaining an interesting and useful social media stream is not getting the results it deserves?
I do!
I spend hours every week working on our social accounts. Finding great links to share, thinking about the wording of the updates, selecting or creating great images to go with them and then scheduling them.
The problem is that minutes after the tweet go out or an hour or so after the Facebook update goes out they cease to be useful and all that work stops paying off.
Today I want to show you a tool that I’ve been using this year that extends the pay off and makes the work you put into your social media much more worthwhile!
Meet my friend…. Edgar
This time last year after creating a video on how I approached social media I had a number of ProBlogger readers suggest that I check out Edgar – a tool that is great for managing social media updates.
The fact that I heard the recommendation several times within a couple of days made me curious, so early this year I decided to sign up and give it a go.
I was immediately struck by how powerful the tool was.
How Edgar Works
I’ve created a video below that walks you through exactly how I use Edgar – here it is.
For those of you who prefer to read…. in short here’s how Edgar works:
Note: you can currently get a month free trial of Edgar as a ProBlogger reader.
You set up two things before Edgar goes to work (and starts saving you a lot of time!):
Firstly – Edgar allows you to create a library of social media updates for Twitter, Facebook (pages, profiles and groups) and LinkedIn.
You save each update as a certain ‘category’ of content.
For example you might have categories for ‘evergreen blog posts’, ‘quotes’, ‘promotions’ etc. This takes no longer than scheduling a normal social media update.
Here’s a screenshot of some of the newly added updates that I’ve put into the ‘ProBlogger Evergreen Blog Posts’ category for my ProBlogger Twitter Account.
Secondly – You then set up a schedule for when you want updates to go out from each category and choose which social accounts they should go out to.
For example you might choose to have your ‘evergreen blog posts’ to go out on your Twitter account at 9am and 9pm every day and for them to go on your Facebook page at noon every weekday. Then your ‘quotes’ might go out on Twitter at 3pm and 3am and your ‘promotions’ might go on Twitter every Wednesday at 7pm.
Here’s a screenshot of part of the schedule of tweets for the ProBlogger twitter account:
You can set up as few or as many slots in your schedule as you like.
Then… Edgar goes to work and uses the updates you have put into your library to create a queue of updates that he’ll then start posting at the times and on the accounts you’ve set up in your schedule. The queue never runs out – it keeps repeating for as long as you leave it set up.
Here’s the next few updates that are scheduled in the queue for the ProBlogger Twitter account.
Once updates go out, Edgar gives you analytics on how they perform in terms of how many likes, comments and shares they got – so you can see what updates work and what you might want to improve or remove from your library.
How I Use Edgar
Edgar works on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
I’ve chosen to use it mostly on my Twitter accounts at ProBlogger and Digital Photography School and it has completely changed the way that those accounts operate and the results have been fantastic.
Before Edgar both of those Twitter accounts were pretty embarrassing.
I used them largely to:
- have automated tweets go out every time a blog post or a job on the Job Board went live (the tweets had no images and were simply a blog title and a link)
- the occasional personal tweet (when I remembered to put one out)
- promotional tweets every time we launched anything
Both tweet streams had very little in the way of visual content and didn’t have much personality to them. I knew I could so much better and that the result was that we were not getting the traffic or engagement with readers on those accounts that we could potentially have received.
When I came across Edgar I decided that Twitter would be my first testing ground for the tool and began to create my library of tweets an to construct my schedule.
At first I only had a schedule with a handful of slots in it and my library only had 20 or so updates in it (mainly evergreen blog posts). I didn’t want my followers seeing the same tweets all day every day so I started slow.
Gradually over the last 10 months I’ve added more and more content to my library which has enabled me to add more slots to the schedule.
Today I have over 2400 updates in my library and Edgar posts hundreds of updates to different social media accounts for me each week.
I’m still careful to keep adding fresh content into Edgar every week to mix things up and do add extra content in each week manually (more timely tweets, community questions, polls etc) to mix things up – but I’m happy to say that I’m now proud of my Twitter accounts and the resulting extra traffic and engagement that the accounts have had makes the effort of setting Edgar up worthwhile.
An Investment Worth Considering
As I speak about in the video above Edgar does have a monthly fee (starting at $49 a month). When I first saw this it did make me think carefully about if I should sign up for it. That kind of monthly fee is not to be taken lightly. However as I thought about the amount of time Edgar could potentially save me and the increased traffic and engagement that it could drive, I realised it was an investment I needed to make.
In many ways I see Edgar as doing the work that I could have otherwise outsourced to a virtual assistant. But at $49 a month I suspect that Edgar is achieving more each month than I could expect to get from a person that I paid that much.
Edgar will not suit every budget and is probably more suited to some types of blogs than others. My blogs are largely full of evergreen content and so my social media accounts can likewise focus upon sharing that kind of content. If your blog is more news focused or needs to mainly be sharing timely content then it may not be as effective for you.
It’s also worth noting that while Edgar will in the long run save you significant time if you use it to the extent that I have – it does take some work to set up.
I’ve taken the approach to add in a 4-8 updates every day of the year so far. That’s about 10-20 minutes work per day for me to set it up. This has enabled me to get almost all of my evergreen content from my archives into Edgar.
Once I’m finished putting in that archived content I will be able to reduce my daily work in Edgar to less than 5 minutes a day (just adding in new fresh content). So it takes some work to set up – but has some serious long term benefits of doing so.
I would highly recommend Edgar. It is something I’ve been paying for all year and a tool I’ll continue to use going forward as a key part of my social media strategy.
Get a Free Month Trial Of Edgar
If you’re curious as to whether Edgar is a fit for you and your business Edgar Currently Is Offering a Free Month Long Trial. This is how I started out to assess it for myself and it gave me a good chance to test the tool on one of my accounts.
Disclaimer: I am NOT an affiliate for Edgar or Social Brilliant but Edgar is a sponsor of the ProBlogger Podcast. I want to be perfectly clear that I do have a sponsorship arrangement with Edgar for transparency’s sake but also want it to be clear that I’m a paid up user of Edgar and have been using it (and will continue to use it) every day since January of 2015.
