How I automated my social media for life (for just the measly cost of 2 weeks of coffee!)

Love it or hate it, social media is the major communication tool of our day and it’s not disappearing anytime soon. It’s where the audience is and you need to know how to reach them and grab their attention within 2 seconds. To make things interesting, everyone likes to communicate in different ways, on different platforms, so that makes our job pretty darn interesting. Like me, your organisation probably uses a few social media platforms to reach your target audience. I use LinkedIn, Facebook, Instragram & Twitter, and I’m only just scratching the surface with what people use. You want to be where your people are. That’s why people in different countries, different industries, different demographics, each have their preferred platforms. So how do you write your message really well, and then wrangle that message into 3, 4, 5, 10 different platforms, each with their own requirements for image dimensions, character limits, links and hashtags?

Enter from stage left, MissingLettr. “Boo! Big Whoop!”, the audience heckles. Another social media tool that lets you create targeted and automated social media campaigns for your content. “Show me something new!”… and so it does! MissingLettr schedules 9 drip feed posts for one campaign over one year across multiple social media platforms, but the game changer is that it pulls quotes and images from your blog post to suggest and create new social media images using templates you’ve customised. In fact, everything is customisable. You can change the hashtags, quotes, speech bubbles, images and text for every post and every platform, or you can keep them all the same. It took me about 5 minutes to setup one campaign. Nine images, text, hashtags, on multiple platforms… Boom! Done! The template options are great, and being able to design “speech bubble” text overlaying images is the game changer for me. This cuts out the whole painful step of creating images in Photoshop, Illustrator, Canva or your design program of choice. My templates provide me consistency in my branding but there is more than enough flexibility to customise the content within. Nothing plays ball nicely with Instagram yet but this is all about to change. In the meantime to reduce time copying and pasting my image and text, I have setup an IFTTT applet: If new photo upload on Facebook Page (from MissingLettr), then add photo to Instagram Buffer. So my complete workflow looks like this:

1. Write blog post (30 minutes)
2. Create MissingLettr campaign for 9 posts on 3 platforms (5 minutes)
3. Automatic scheduled posts go out to Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn on days 0, 3, 7, 14, 30, 90, 180, 270, 365 (0 minutes)
4. IFTTT triggers my Facebook posts to go straight to Buffer Instagram account (o minutes)
5. Hit Go in Buffer to schedule identical Instagram post and I post it in my Instagram app (1.5 minutes)

Stop the clock! 36.5 minutes… that’s less than 1.5 Pomodoro sessions! And for bonus points, to automate reaching my email list, I setup an RSS triggered campaign using my blog RSS feed (and possibly filtered by a hashtag, depending on the mailing list service). So how does this cost 10 coffees? Well, it is free for small time users, but to get some decent use out of it, you’re looking at $15/$40/$65+ month, depending on the number of campaigns you output, social profiles, team members, etc. But if you’re super quick, you can grab the Small Team lifetime plan deal for MissingLettr on AppSumo for just $49. That’s it! EDIT: The Appsumo deal has now expired but you can still have a 14 day trial or get the Free forever basic plan.