Vinny O'Hare

You are here: Home / Archives for Social Media

Hootsuite Bulk Uploader Date Changer

By Vinny O'Hare

I use Hootsuite a lot for scheduling my social media post. I have a few spreadsheets that I upload every month with 30-50 items in each and when the month changes to the next month I have to go into my Google Drive (Never use Excel with Hootsuite) and open the spreadsheet. One of the things you would think is that you can just do a simple search and replace and change the month. Normally you would think that would work but what ends up happening is the days of the week also get messed up.

Let’s say I am going from July to August. I would open the spreadsheet and go EDIT > Search and Replace and change the date from 7/ to 8/. Well it works fine but it also changes the date on the 7th, 17th, and 27th of the month to the 8th, 18th, and 28th. Needless to say that if you don’t fix this the spreadsheet will have errors in it when you upload it via the Hootsuite bulk upload tool because the post are not in order date anymore and the times will get messed up.

Hootsuite Bulk Uploader Solution

Hootsuite Bulk Uploader solutionAfter months of struggling with this I finally figured out a solution. In the find and replace box add a caret (That funny thing above the 6 key on your keyboard) in the find section. Then scroll down and check off match case and search using regular expressions. You should then be able to look at your csv file and notice that the dates for the 7th, 17th, and 28th hasn’t changed at all.

Save the file as a csv and you are good to go. Then make the same changes the next month. This will save you valuable time using the bulk upload tool.

 

Social Media Planning in Advance

By Vinny O'Hare

I often get asked about how I do my social media post scheduling. One of my worst kept secrets is I use the Hootsuite bulk uploader. I am a Hootsuite Ambassador and love talking about all the features they have. I will be talking about this more at my Affiliate Summit roundtable session if you will be in Las Vegas I encourage you to come hear the exact steps I use. I am a set up once and rinse a repeat type of guy and the Hootsuite bulk uploader lets me do this. In my case I use a monthly bulk upload plan.

Hootsuite has a video on this that you can see in the first post below. Odds are you saw this post because it was shared on social media. 🙂

hootsuite schedule post image
Here’s how to schedule tweets with Hootsuite’s Twitter scheduler. Schedule Twitter messages easily today!

Of course having a plan and taking stock of what works and more important what doesn’t work is important. I will take my most popular social media post and reschedule them and take the non performers out or add a hashtag to it to make the post better. Below is a few templates that you can use.

social template pic
Social media is a relatively new tool for most businesses. This means that, unlike many other marketing tools, when people begin to build out social media for their business, they’re starting from scratch. They haven’t created social media strategies before or they don’t know what questions to ask for a social media audit, and finding out can be both difficult and time consuming.

We all know that social media post get more traction when there is an image involved in the post. Below you will find some new tools to make your images stand out.

Are you getting maximum results from your visual content? Do you use fonts, colors and clever effects to make your company’s images more recognizable? Graphics that are consistent with your company’s established image increase your audience engagement by creating familiarity. In this article you’ll discover how to use simple design tactics to help your audience instantly associate your pictures with your brand.

Speaking at Author Marketing Live

By Vinny O'Hare

Vinny O'Hare at author Marketing live graphic

Just putting on the finishing touches to our presentation for Author Marketing Live. Debbie and I are doing a presentation called “Fast & Easy Ways To Find True Fans & Rabid Readers with Social Media” which I have to say I am quite proud of.

I have about 4 or 5 tips that will help authors save time when using social media while building a fan base that will want to read their books. While I can’t say exactly what these tools are I can say that it will be a sold out audience and we are prepared to have authors sitting there with their eyes wide open and writing down the tips we are giving them.

It will be my first time in Cleveland unless you count the 2 minutes I spent there changing planes once. If you are going to be there I look forward to seeing you, please come up and say Hi!

If you waited to long and didn’t get a ticket I suggest you follow the hashtag #AMLive14 as I will be tweeting from the stage. Well not really since I set up the tweets to go out last week.

Extend Facebook Reach With One Button

By Vinny O'Hare

I was talking with a buddy online and he was telling me how his Facebook reach was going down and down and down. At first I gave him a few tips on how to increase it and then I told him why not put your Hootsuite tweet sheet in and push the same tweets to Facebook as you are putting on Twitter. I talked a little about this in my Twitter post last week.

Of course I would not do this all the time but for the sake of testing I did it myself with one of my sites. I pulled out my monthly Twitter sheet I have set up for Hootsuite and deleted the first 9 rows and saved it and uploaded it using the bulk upload tool in Hootsuite. As you can see below I expanded my reach with no problem. This was only posting 2 more times a day.

Expand Facebook Reach

Now if I was to do this seriously I would have a longer Tweet sheet than having the normal 140 characters. Maybe take a snippet of content out of a page and link it back to that page. Odds are the image for the post would get pulled automatically from the page?

If you are using Hootsuite and the bulk uploader why not give this a try! For people that are familiar with the tool already this could be set up in a matter of 1 minute pushing one button.

My Facebook reach has been off the charts since doing this.

Click To Tweet

What Twitter Has Become To Me

By Vinny O'Hare

This past week I have seen a ton of people going back and seeing their first tweet since it was Twitter’s 8th anniversary. Twitter set up a special url for you to go see what your tweet was. If you are curious about it you can check yours out here.

As I was looking through my account I started to think about how much my opinion of Twitter has changed. I was very vocal when it came to them putting “Paid Tweets” on the site. I was even mentioned on the NY Times website. My thoughts have changed since I think Twitter has so many users that have given up on the service that it has just become a broadcast platform to a degree.

Scheduled Tweets

Schedule tweets in bulkPeople get so upset over scheduled tweets it cracks me up. Sure sometimes breaking news happens and a scheduled tweet goes out. Does anyone notice? Does anyone care? Isn’t there much bigger things in life to worry about? I just got finished scheduling about 2000 tweets. Some are evergreen, some are funny, some are interactive, some are informative, and some are tweets to landing pages that are designed for sales.

I break them up and most go out in the early morning so when I get up I already have interaction to respond to. I also schedule some for my European audience, which has been some of the best interaction I get. Guess being a night owl helps with that.

I am guessing that the 140 characters are too limiting to have a meaningful conversation especially if you are using Twitter on the web. I use Hootsuite where I can filter people into a list. I don’t have to see tweets from everyone I follow. I keep a few private list set up and keep track and respond to my @ messages. Between that and the RavenTools social monitor I can keep up and track everything in all the social media accounts I am responsible for.

Hootsuite has a bulk upload tool that is simple to use. A simple csv file with 3 rows and hit what social media accounts you want to post to and you are done. I recommend using Google docs to set up the CSV file, for some reason it doesn’t play nice in excel.

I use the bulk upload tool to upload to Twitter and also to Facebook and G+. Sometimes I set up different files for each but you can blast the same message out to all 3 if you want. If you hook up some apps in Hootsuite you can blast out to even more places. I concentrate on the big 3 social networks for the most part.

Using the schedule in bulk tool in Hootsuite makes life so much easier. You can sign up for a free account but I use the pro account for the features.  It is well worth it for me.