If you are getting bogged down with social media updates and need help, try Social Oomph. It is a service that automates the sharing of social updates and it reduces the work and time required.
What does Social oomph do?
Originally Social Oomph was designed to help automate and promote only Twitter tweets, but it soon broadened its scope to include other social media services. These days it supports for following social media networks:
- Plurk
The service enables you to create updates and to post them to your social accounts automatically on a schedule. It can be a recurring schedule too, so one post can be shared many times over hours, days, weeks or or even months.
Social Oomph has a lot of advanced and powerful features, but it is not a good service for absolute beginners. Some parts of it are quite complicated and it suits professional marketers more than casual bloggers who want to save a few minutes each day on social media.
Professionals will like the range of features and the flexibility, but there are a few drawbacks as we will see.
How much does it cost?
Great news! A free account is available, with limitations of course, and the main one is that is it only works with Twitter. You can do most things for free with up to five Twitter accounts, which is brilliant if you share a lot of updates on the service and have a lot of followers.
A subscription is required to add Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other accounts. This is just under $36 a month ($17.97 every two weeks). It is therefore not particularly cheap, but neither is it expensive. The top accounts at some rivals are more than this.
Let’s see how to create a free account and use it to post updates to Twitter.
1 Get a free Social Oomph account
Go to the Social Oomph website (socialoomph.com) and click the Sign Up link in the menu bar at the top. Unlike other services, there are no plans to choose from and everyone creates a free account to begin with. You can upgrade later if you want more features.
2 Free trials and the Network menu
You will be encouraged (nagged?) to sign up for a free trial. You don’t immediately have to do this and it is a good idea to explore the service first and to try out some of the Twitter features. You can activate the free trial later when you are more familiar with the service and will get more out of it.
For now, click the Networks menu and there are options to connect and manage social accounts. Click Connect Social Account.
3 Add your Twitter account
Social media services are displayed on tabs. Click a tab and you can connect Social Oomph with the service.
With a free account you can only select the Twitter tab and the others are only available to subscribers or when you activate the free trial. Click Authorise Access.
4 Authorise Twitter
As usual when adding social accounts to these automation services, you must authorise Social Oomph to access your Twitter account so that it can share updates to the service.
5 Manage your social accounts
Return to the Networks menu (step 2) and click Manage Connected Accounts. This lists all the social accounts that have been added. Here I have added LinkedIn in addition to Twitter, using the free trial.
There is a button to Connect Another Social Account. You could add Facebook and Pinterest will a full Social Oomph account or the trial, but unlike Twitter and Linked in, it is crazy complicated.
It takes no less than 28 steps to add Facebook and 19 steps to add Pinterest. You basically have to register with Facebook and Pinterest as a developer and then create and publish an app. It’s weird.
There are full instructions available, but you should check them out before signing up for a subscription. You might find that the process is too complicated or not worth it compared to other services which make this a couple of simple mouse clicks.
6 Create an update
Suppose you want to post an update to a social network like Twitter. Go to the Posting menu and click Create New Update.
7 Choose the update type
There are tabs at the top and the choice is between a text update or an image and text update. (Ignore the blog post tab for now.)
The only difference between them is that the New Image & Text tab has four buttons to add up to four images.
Enter the text for the update you want to share and add any links. Click the Shorten Links button to replace the links you add with shorter ones. It saves valuable characters when posting to Twitter.
Below the text box is a list of options and an update can be published right now or saved as a draft so you can use it later, and so on.
8 Schedule a date and time
Select the option to Publish the update at an exact date and time. This is shown in the box and you can click in the box and change the date and time or click the calendar button on the right.
9 Schedule recurring posts
There is an option to Recurringly publish the update at a specific frequency. Tick the box if you want it.
The options range from once an hour to once a year. It is a very long list and has numerous options enabling the post to be re-shared hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.
When all the options you need have been set, click the Save button.
10 View and manage updates
Return to the Posting menu and select Manage Existing updates.
11 See old and future updates
Both past updates that have been shared and new ones waiting to be posted are displayed. Here you can see the top post is a recurring active one (the green label) and the bottom post has been published (green label).
There are New, Copy and Delete buttons for old posts, and new ones waiting to go out on a schedule can be edited and images added.
That’s it for this introduction to Social Oomph. There are many more features and some people love it. Others find it a bit too complicated.
Action Points
- Sign up for a free Social Oomph account
- Add one or more Twitter accounts
- Create a post
- Set the schedule and recurring options
- View and manage past and future posts
- Use the free trial to check out the Pro features
Online Course: Automate social media sharing and updates
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6 Automate social media with SocialPilot
7 Automate social media with Social Oomph
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9 Shares with Chrome and Safari extensions
