Gone are the days that posting a few times per day on social media accounts and expecting to get any meaningful results. The tenacious appetite for relevant content from social network users is growing daily. Consistently finding, scheduling and posting relevant, valuable curated content that is interesting to your target audience has become far more challenging for social media agencies, marketers and brands. The ability to control all aspects of the process, yet garner massive time savings with result driven capabilities are paramount to competing in this environment.
If you don’t have time to focus on engagement and building relationships, you are not getting results. If you are spending time scheduling content posts, you’re not engaging. If your social media automation isn’t providing an efficient work-flow solution for content management, you’re going to like what we are about to share with you.
Bundle Post is announcing the release of its version 3.0, which is packed with 8 new upgrades that make content curation and social media marketing even easier. The improvements contained in this release are far from simple. In fact, this package of upgrades is revolutionary in terms of functionality, efficiency and social media posting control.
Of the seven new advancements, five are for all user types and two of the new features are Pro user only capabilities that we know you’re going to go crazy over. So let’s dive into the 3.0 and show you the powerful functions that have been included.
1) Feed Attribution - (Pro Accounts Only)
You can now attribute an entire feed channel to an author, website or even add hashtags to posts from a specific Google alert.
- Support for by/via @ mention attributions.
- Manually edit a specific post attribution on the export table.
- Edit/add feed channel attribution at any time.
- Automatically manages every posts character length for you.
Let’s say you have an RSS feed from a specific website or blog already added into Bundle Post and you want to attribute the posts you use from that feed channel to the site/author whenever you use their content. All you have to do is edit the attribution field next to their feed channel with something like “by @BundlePost”. From then on when you select content from their feed channel on the export table, the system will append by @BundlePost to the text of each post.
Maybe your brand has a specific hashtag (like #weRockFood) that you use with your community and want to append that hashtag to all of your content from your blog when you share it on social sites. Next to your blogs feed channel in Bundle Post, add #weRockFood in the attribution field for that feed and the system will append it to each post when you export.
If all this wasn’t enough, we have also added the attribution function to the Bundlet Chrome extension. When you add a new RSS feed channel to Bundle Post using the Bundlet, you will be able to set attribution right then and there!
There are so many awesome uses for the attribution feature, but what is really cool is that the system will always adjust the number of characters in the text of posts with attribution assigned, ensuring the character limit requirements are handled for you and room is made for your attribution. What’s more, though you set attribution for an entire feed channel, you are able to edit specific attributions manually on the export table if you desire.
Finally, we don’t overwrite the text of posts in feed channels with the attribution text, we append the attribution only during an export, so you can change attribution at any time in the future and on your next export the new attribution will be live without effecting all the posts in that channel with the previous attribution.
2) Time Slot Control - (Pro Accounts Only)
When doing an export, there are times you may want to remove specific date/time slots from an export, without having to open the file after exporting and manually making the changes. (we recommend you never open/edit export files as it changes the formatting of special characters) But maybe you want to lighten the number of posts you have over the weekend, or you need to do an export starting at today’s date but it’s already three hours passed the first time slot in a given schedule.
Now you can toggle specific date and time slots on/off from the export table, without effecting the actual schedule you are using. To remove a specific posting date/time, click the blue clock icon at the left of the post. This will remove that time slot from the export for that date only, leaving that time slot active for previous and future days within the export. You can toggle a removed time slot back on if you change your mind, by clicking the grey clock icon again.
When you shut off a specific date/time, the system will automatically move the post that was in that slot down one time slot for you. The removed time slot will remain on the screen as a blank post and will not be exported at all, allowing you to easily see the time slots you have toggle off.
3) Redesigned Export Table
We have made some substantial improvements to the Export Table design and functionality, making managing hundreds of feed channels, folders and content much more efficient and user-friendly. The left column containing your huge list of Feed Channels, My Content, Queues, Follow Friday and Hashtag folders, requiring you to scroll over and over is now gone. We have replaced the left column with simple and clean drop down buttons on the top of the page, allowing you to easily access content and other functions without having to scroll.
By cleaning up the main part of the export table, we were able to spread the post table all the way out, making a much more simplified view with all posts taking up a single line. The new main export table section is more compact, yet easier to view and gives more room for additional functionality we are adding today as well as future capabilities to come.
4) Last Used
Knowledge is power, when you use the knowledge effectively. We believe it’s incredibly helpful and important to track the dates you last used a piece of content in the system, as well as the last date you exported for a specific schedule in the system. Easily having access to this information enables to you better plan your next required content scheduling for a particular social media account and what content you have not shared in a while.
Now, all content, schedules and feed channel posts are tracked and given date/time stamps, clearly showing you when it was last used in an export from the system.
We took this further and added the same tracking to all folders in the system as well. Finally, we also display the date and time every single piece of content in the system was last scheduled and even show you last exported and scheduled post dates when you start a new export as show below.
We believe tracking and providing this information to our users will enable them to better plan campaigns and be more effective with the short and long-term use of their content marketing.
5) Character Length Handling
The Bundle Post system now automatically corrects the character length of your posts at all times. Whether you are using the new attributions, edit the text of a post or auto-hashtag, Bundle Post will calculate character length and ensure that you are within the proper limits for uploading into the dashboard of your choice.
You will no longer have posts that sneak by with a few too many characters, causing an error when you upload to Hootsuite or other dashboards.
6) Hashtag Reminder
How many times have you exported your scheduled content and uploaded it and realized you forgot to run hashtags? We have too. Now Bundle Post will remind and ask you before downloading your export file if you have not yet run hashtags on the export. We keep track if you have done and don’t nag you, so you’ll only see the reminder if you forget.
7) Content Source Colors
We have made some changes to the export table colors we know you’re going to appreciate. The system handled this terribly before, in that only each feed channel received a different color, but all other content from other folder sources were kept the same color. Now:
- A newly modified color scheme, contrasts and sequence make it easier to differentiate from content types/sources.
- A different color will be assigned to content coming from each different folder, not just feed channels.
8) Insert a Post
You can now manually create and insert a post into the export table in real-time. Posts inserted this way are not saved to the database, but are exported with all of your other posts. A great way to add posts to an export on the fly.
Ok, so we couldn’t stop at 8 new features. Though there are quite a few other unnamed changes, enhancements and improvements that you will quickly notice, we will layout just three more bonus upgrades for you here.
**BONUS Upgrades**
1) Export Auto-Naming:
We have added an additional bonus enhancement that is not really a new feature, but we know it will be something you’ll love. Bundle Post now automatically names your export files using the name of the schedule plus the dashboard platform you exported it for. It also appends the date at the end so you can easily identify the newest export you downloaded for that schedule, platform or client. It looks something like this – Client A – Twitter-Bundlepost-export-for-hootsuite-Dec-20-2013.csv
2) More Schedule Posting Times:
When adding multiple time slots to a schedule with start and ending times, you used to only have options for on the hour, the fifteens, half and three-quarter hours. Bundle Post 3.0 allows you to create schedule posting times that are far more varied and ensuring that your social media posts are going at non-standard times each hour of the day.
3) RSS Error Handling:
The new Bundle Post Feed Channel page has been highly improved with some new functions and improved error handling.
First, we have added an Update All Feeds option that allows you to force the system to ingest the latest content for all of your feeds in the system at once. This process can be time-consuming if you have several feed channels in the system, but prevents you from having to manually update feeds in between the three times per day automatic function already in place.
Secondly, we have added error handling for feed channels. This new process handles two main functions; 1) It ensures that the URL you add for a feed channel is formatted properly (example: contains the http://) and if it is not done correctly, the system automatically fixes it for you. 2) If a feed channel you have added to the system stops working or is not ingesting content, it will automatically flag that feed channel with a image next to the RSS having an issue. This alerts you that something is wrong with the source of the RSS, it has been entered wrong and is not updating, or otherwise isn’t a supported feed source.
