Good morning Internet fans, it is Ryan Perry with Simple Biz Support. Today is Wednesday, July 17, therefore, it is Internet Marketing Wednesday, and as usual, I have the beautiful and talented Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing on the other side. Good morning, Sarah.

Sarah Giometti: Good morning, Ryan. How are you?

RP: I’m doing good. Yourself today?

SG: Doing fabulous, thank you.

RP: Very good. Actually, it’s a beautiful day, I think we might be in the mid to high 80s, so I’m looking forward to spending some time outside after I get some work done.

SG: Yeah, I think it’s time to leave my cave.

RP: Definitely. Before you leave the cave, though, we need to talk about another aggregate and social media scheduler. Couple of weeks ago, we talked about Post Planner and what the benefits of using Post Planner to save time and the aggregate content for social media accounts. And Post Planner’s are not the only product that’s out there. There’s another one that you use, and that is Bundle Post. Maybe you could start off telling us a little bit about some of the key features of Bundle Post, what makes it unique or special, and why a small business owner may be interested in this product.

SG: It is mainly an RSS feed aggregator. It takes a little bit of work to set it up initially, but once it’s setup, it makes auto posting to your social media channels really easy.

RP: Okay, and before we get too deep, I just don’t want to lose people. If people aren’t familiar with an RSS feed, essentially what that is, is most hopefully, everybody’s blog has an RSS feed. And essentially, it’s just a signal that says, “This is my database of all the different blogs that I have.” And so, if you connect to an RSS feed, you’re essentially able to import or review all the blog post that they’ve had in a chronological order.

SG: Correct.

RP: Kind of in a layman sense… It’s very layman, very nontechnical, layman’s terms.

SG: Right. It also, the RSS feed link strips out all of the formatting of your website, so that the aggregators can just get the information: “Here is the headline. Here is the text. Here is the picture.” When people link through to it, they do get sent all the way to that website article, so that all of the content is there, but it makes it just easier to be able to curate content in a hurry. We predominantly use this for Twitter, especially since you recommended 10 to 30 times a day, because Twitter moves so fast, this is a quick and easy way to schedule that out within just a few minutes.

RP: Okay, and then let’s also talk about, real quickly for those that didn’t see the last episode, some of the problems that people have. I know it’s an issue why I started using software like this is simply because, I didn’t have the time or the desire to go out and find this content. I didn’t want to have to create a list of all these different things and put it like in an Excel spreadsheet and then click on it, and then kinda see what all different blogs were; go, “Ooh, I like that one. Copy the link,” and then post it on Twitter, and then go, “Oh, okay. It’s an hour… An hour’s gone by. I gotta find more content.” So, I think one of the real advantage is to using something like Bundle Post is two-for-one. You can take all of your RSS feeds that you have, and you can literally… And I haven’t used Bundle Post, but does it actually aggregate all the contents so you can see all the different post?

SG: It does separately, so what you do is, in the initial setup, it takes a little bit more time than Post Planner, ’cause you have to add in… You have to add in the RSS feeds that you want to track and pull from. And then, you gotta create the schedule and do a hashtag strategy, at least that’s recommended. But once it’s all in there, it’s really easy to aggregate the content and create your schedule for the one to five days that you’re doing it at a time. And so, I think I timed myself. I was able to do five days in about five minutes.

RP: Oh, wow.

SG: So, it is also geared… It is a little more geared towards either agencies, or social media manager with multiple clients, or serial entrepreneur, those are probably the primary target marking, ’cause where price point is, the level I pay for, I get unlimited everything, and I need that ’cause I have multiple clients as well as my own staff Whereas single businesses may or may not be the best option, unless you want to pay the… The money to have unlimited… You type like one RSS feed, a couple social media accounts, so that’s just the big difference is, it is a little bit more aimed towards or the bigger business.

RP: Right, where I think if we go back to Post Planner, they don’t limit the number of feeds as far as I know that you can go. However, they do limit the number of social media accounts, so as an example the basic account that I use, I’m limited to two feeds, which is okay, because for me and Simple Biz Support, I’m worried about curating and delivering content on a calendar basis, on a timely basis where it’s already set. And that’s something that Bundle Post does also, is the fact that, basically, you create your calendar and say, “Okay, this day, I want post to go out at this time, this time, this time, this time.” And then essentially, you import that feed into it, and it automatically takes care of, when 9:00 rolls around, boom. Your tweet goes out at 9:45. If that’s the time you chose, boom, your next one goes out, assuming that you’ve actually put content in there.

SG: Right, and actually you aren’t picking by time, you’re just… I’ll walk you guys through it. It’s kinda cool ’cause I can pick, I can go and just say, the Simple Biz Support blog and pick the last five articles and dump it into my schedule and then randomize it, so it mixes everything up. Then it just automatically, based on my schedule, it starts forward… You have to do it the day before ’cause it starts for tomorrow morning at the very first time I’ve set in my schedule. And then works it way through…

RP: Let me ask you this, when you say, when you set your schedule, what do you mean by that? Are you just telling it, “I want you to post 20 times” and it determines out exactly what time it does or you actually… But you’re not picking the time?

SG: Well, sort of. I pick the start time and how many times a day I want to do it, or if I want to do it, 60-minute increments starting at 7 AM, then I had to count how many times I want and …who did I want it to end. And so, I just say, every six… You do 10 posts a day, every 60 minutes, from 7:00 to 7:00. It just create a schedule.

RP: Okay, and that’s a little bit different than Post Planner. You actually… In Post Planner, you actually create a calendar and you can do it by the day that you want or you can grab a group of days and then… So what I have done is I’ve actually set it, this time send a post, at this time send a post. But if you’re sending a lot of content, it’s cool that it all automatically… If you put X number of pieces in, you can just say, fill the slot between 7 and 7 as an example.

SG: Right. And before… And now you could… Before I compile and show you guys this, I need to make sure where I end from the last time that we did because you don’t want to overlap the content either. And it does right now, I exported into HootSuite, so you compile it all then you export into HootSuite and HootSuite pushes it all out to Twitter on a schedule.

RP: Okay, well when you’re ready go ahead and start that screen show. We’ve got about seven minutes left in this episode.

SG: Let’s see, screen share.

RP: Hopefully, we didn’t yack too much ahead of time, we give you enough time to do some actual presentation. Here we go, alright, it’s up.

SG: So here’s Bundle Post. One of the things you’ll have to do when you first get it is set it up. So we’ll go into Schedules and here I have all the different client schedules, so we’ll go into… Since I got multiple ones, it’s good to have a system especially… So if any of your social media managers are thinking of using this, you want to have a system. So all of mine are the initials of my client, then a dash, then what the schedule is for. So it’s really good for Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. I typically don’t use auto-posting for Facebook because of reach, Facebook throttles it if you don’t schedule on Facebook directly but you can use this for content curation that you then copy and paste in the Facebook and schedule. So you’ll see that my personal Twitter is 11 times a day, my business Twitter is 20 times a day, and if we look at it, you know that I did the multiple time slots, it’s starting from 4 AM to 11 PM, my time, and it’s just on the hour or on the five after the hour. Once you setup your schedule, it’s setup. You can change it, you can go through in with a little trash can, delete it all and redo your schedule if you find thing’s changed. But pretty much, once you set it up, it’s set up.

SG: Then the next thing you’ll want to do is add your feeds. This is a little bit more work, you have to go find the RSS feed for the blog articles that you’ll want to pull from, and you can always add/remove things. And so you’ll have in here a bit a whole bunch of social media, industry leaders, thought leaders, people I know personally that I have relationships with, my own staff is in here. So my blog, my feeds, my YouTube, and those are ones that start, so if I use the content it doesn’t get removed from the choices of content, so I can re-use my own content which is really important. You want to be able to post journal content often, whereas when you’re posting everyone else’s content there’s no reason to promote them more than once usually.

RP: Alright, so let me ask you this. So this feed that we’re looking at right now, this is currently content that it’s finding, that it’s actually going to put into your outgoing feed?

SG: Not all of it. So this is a step of this is where I want to curate from, and so this is the biggest part of the setup. I know who in the industry that I want to pull information from and I set it up that these RSS feeds I want the option to pull their content from.

RP: Okay, so essentially, we’re looking at the aggregate, this is where all the information comes in.

SG: Yes, this is just the aggregate. And so again, once you set it up it is setup and ready to go. And again, I’ve got the same naming convention that I did for the schedule, initials of the client, dash, name of the blog, and then via their Twitter handle of the blog, the company. And so I have it for all the different clients.

RP: Okay, so then if you’re going… So how do we actually put content into the scheduler?

SG: First, there’s one more thing that you need to setup. Then once you’re setup you’re setup, and these are the three minimum things to set up is the hashtags. So you go in… We’ll open up the Provaro Marketing one. And what it does is, when it’s pulling the content from the RSS feed in the title of the blog articles, if any of these words, any of these keywords are in the title of the blog article it swaps it out for a hashtag and so you can automatically hashtag the content before you push it into Twitter, which is since there’s two billion searches a day on Twitter search algorithm or search engine, that you definitely want in there searching by hashtag usually. You want to make sure you have this setup. And again, you can add and remove as time goes on.

RP: Okay, perfect.

SG: So once you’ve set everything up, you go to start export and that’s why I was looking at HootSuite to see publisher. I’m going to check real quick, we’re in Saturday, because I’m going to pick…

RP: You’re already built out through Saturday?

SG: I am. I’m built out through Saturday morning so…

RP: Which is great because I think one of the biggest problem with business owners is we go, “Oh, okay.” We put content out and then oh, it’s the next day again so to be able to put out like you were saying, three to five days of content in five minutes, how powerful is that?

SG: Right. Right. Actually, I’m looking at these. These are LinkedIn and Google Plus through Saturday, so I could start tomorrow. But again, you can do several days really quick and I’ll show you how. I’m picking my Twitter schedule, select the date, it’s automatically tomorrow ’cause it has to start at the top of the schedule. I clicked continue and now we go into my feed channels. So I scroll in here and let’s select…

RP: I’m just saying how we got about two minutes left, so we’re not going to be able to build out the whole day.

SG: So you go on here and this is all the blogs, trying the search engine land. I can randomly pick the ones I want. I can select first five first 10. Let’s just do the first five we’ve selected. It dumps them in there. Let me get a couple other in here to make it… They’re selected.

RP: Each one of these folders that you’re opening is somebody’s RSS feed essentially?

SG: Right, they’ve already pre-done and so you can see that a bunch in here that’ll get me partially through the day tomorrow. I may just get one more in here. And then you want to make sure you have your own stuff in here. So, now they’re color coded by the different blog articles. I want to then next, I want to go in and run my hashtags so I go to my hashtag folder, hashtag now, runs through all the content hashtags, what I’ve got set up. Then I want to randomize it so it’s all mixed up. So, I’m not doing five or one person, five on the next, it’s all mixed up.

RP: Right, very cool.

RP: Got it. So I’ve done an entire day in all of a minute and then I just export to HootSuite. I’d click the little HootSuite button and export it and I go into HootSuite and I import it and I’ve scheduled an entire day in two minutes.

RP: That is awesome. So, I can definitely see if you’re having to generate and push a lot of content like you said, if you’re running multiple companies, if you’re an agency, this could be a very, very powerful tool not only for, again, the aggregate being able to see all these content from all the different people is very cool but how quick and easy it is to put that content out into your feed’s pretty powerful.

SG: It is. It also makes my job as a social media manager a lot easier because I can make sure putting out enough content and then we can focus on listening and interacting with people because we’re not spending all of our time finding content. If we removed the walk through and how to set it all up, I did the entire day in one or two minutes, I can do entire week in 10 minutes then we could focus on other strategies to enhance the Twitter strategy and we’re not spending hours and hours on end finding 30 Twitter posts a day.

RP: Right. Right. Very powerful. Alright. Well, our time is up. As always I appreciate your time, great information. That is a Bundle Post, bundlepost.com is where you can find more information. Next week, we’re going to be talking about a new Facebook algorithm change that could affect your feed, your business feed on Facebook. So we’ll be talking about that next week. Sarah, thank you. You have a great day and you get out of your cave and enjoy some sunshine.

SG: Thank you, Ryan. I think I’m going to actually coming in to the office today but it’ll be nice to get out and enjoy some of the beautiful weather we’re having.

RP: Alright, definitely. I’ll see you next week. Take care, everybody.

SG: Bye.