Distributing Content Marketing With Automated Tools

One of the most challenging components of managing and distributing content marketing is the time it takes to post your content to all of the various places you need it to be.

A tempting solution is to use automated tools and various settings within each of the social media platforms to distribute your content. Great idea right?

There’s only one catch…you must be careful that your settings within your distribution channels are not conflicting!

Have you ever noticed a company Facebook page or Twitter account has posted the same thing twice? This often happens because the settings within the platforms are cross promoting content. While using automated tools for distribution is a great way to save time, you may find yourself quickly logging into each platform to remove the duplicate posts.

Here’s a real example of a recent chain of events:

An individual decided to try Hootsuite to distribute their blog postings across multiple platforms. Hootsuite is a great service which allows you to pull in an RSS feed from your blog and automatically send it to profiles like Linkedin, Facebook (both company pages and personal profiles), Twitter, Google+ and more. What was supposed to happen was a blog would get posted on the company website, then the blog would be “pulled” via RSS into the Hootsuite account, and then distributed from there to Facebook, Twitter and Linked in.

This is what actually happened…due to settings within Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin that had already been set up to feed in content from each other, the same blog post was posted as content on the various platforms multiple times.

I’m a big fan of using automated tools to make distributing content more efficient. As you begin to set up your social media accounts and automated feeds for content, it’s a good idea to update your content planner or editorial calendar documents to reflect what you have set up. This way, as you expand your distribution to other platforms, you have a good roadmap to work with!

Hope this helps!

Leanne