Sendible Blog

Here is a handy tip that explains how you can upload a photo to Sendible and then convert it into a link preview to be posted onto Facebook or other social media sites:

1. Go to your Sendible Message Box, Click Photo or File and upload an image to Sendible.

2. Once uploaded, you’ll see your image with 3 little icons at the top right. Click the middle icon (a link).

3. You’ll be able to enter a URL and convert the image to a link preview.

Great video demonstrating how to schedule Facebook and Twitter posts using Sendible courtesy of YourChurchFanPage.

These days, it’s harder than ever to get your updates noticed on Facebook. Due to the sheer volume of posts hitting the news feed, there’s a good chance that your updates will be missed or simply overlooked due to all the other noise. For this reason, it’s now more important than ever to make sure your updates are noticed and acted upon. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how with 6 simple tricks, you can increase your exposure on Facebook and generate more click-throughs to your website.

1. Attribution Links

Several social media management tools, such as Sendible.com, allow you to include attribution links along with your posts. These are little customizable links that appear below your updates and can contain any text you like. They can also link to any website you like. In the example below, we’ve included the link “Visit our blog” below the post.

2. Branded Facebook Posts

It is also possible to include your company name below every update you send to Facebook. So, instead of seeing “via mobile” or “via Sendible”, your posts could display “via My Company” with a little square icon alongside. This is a great way to build up your brand awareness and have Facebook users click on your company name and go directly to your website. The option for branded Facebook posts is currently a feature offered by Sendible.

3. Scheduling

To ensure the best possible chance of having your Facebook posts noticed, you should schedule your posts to be published at the time your fans are most likely to be looking at their Facebook news feed. There are various tools out there that make it easy to schedule your Facebook updates.

4. Link Previews

Another easy way to engage your Facebook fans is by creating interesting link previews. Link previews are made up of a thumbnail, title, caption and description. These details appear whenever you post a link to Facebook. Certain 3rd party social media management products, such as Sendible.com, make it easy to customize these details so that you can make your link previews more descriptive, resulting in better click-through rates.

5. Facebook Photo Albums

Another great way to gain more views and click-throughs, is by posting several photos to a new or existing Facebook Photo Album on your Facebook Page. Facebook Photo Albums are known to generate more click-throughs on a news feed and therefore, higher levels of engagement. You can use a social media dashboard to help you to schedule these Facebook Album posts ahead of time for maximum engagement. Here is an article from our blog that explains how to do this using Sendible.

6. Geotargeting

In Facebook, users disclose a lot of relevant information about themselves – for example their age, gender, location, work history, language etc. As a Facebook Page administrator, you have the ability to deliver content that’s only relevant to specific fans. Since you are targeting specific fans by location or language, you can customize your content to generate the most engagement for the subset of fans that are being targeted. Click here to see how easy it is to target specific fans using a third party social media management tool.

I recently read the following post implying that the levels of engagement on Facebook are reduced when using third party social media management tools. From our analysis, this is completely untrue and we have seen the exact opposite effect with users on our social media platform. By using third party applications, such as Sendible, for scheduling, geotargeting and branding their Facebook updates, brands are in fact seeing higher click-through rates, building better brand awareness and dramatically increasing their engagement ratio. To sign up for a free Sendible trial, visit http://sendible.com/signup.

I keep reading posts about how you shouldn’t post to Facebook using a 3rd party APIs because it kills your EdgeRank. Supposedly Facebook penalizes 3rd party APIs’ EdgeRank (the “secret sauce” that determines how often your Page’s updates show up in users’ news feeds) and collapses 3rd party API updates. While I’m sure that there’s merit to these arguments, I also don’t think writing off social media management systems (SMMS) is necessarily a good idea, or even an option for large companies or for agencies managing multiple brand accounts.

Benefits of using SMMS include:

• Ability for multiple people to post from one central dashboard.Yes, you can now have multiple Page admins on Facebook, but SMMSs offer the ability for multiple admins to manage posts in a more robust way than one-off posting directly to Facebook.
• Workflow tools–post scheduling, draft/approval modes, and ability to assign issues to certain admins are all valuable workflow tools.
• More robust moderation/blocklist capabilities–Facebook offers rudimentary moderation and profanity blocklist functionality, but for regulated industries like pharma, insurance or finance, more robust controls may be necessary.
• Post scheduling–yes, I know–social media is supposed to be real-time and not scheduled, but in reality, that’s not how a lot of businesses work. From needing to schedule posts to cover non-business hours to just needing a schedule to stay on top of posting, being able to view both upcoming and past posts via a calendar can be enormously beneficial. Managing social media accounts is a juggling act and whether you have one person managing all company social media accounts or a bunch of people managing one account, calendaring is, in my opinion, highly valuable.
• Data analysis and reports–Facebook’s Insights leave a lot to be desired in terms of data aggregation, engagement analysis, and activity reports. Yes, there are tools you can use to augment Facebook’s lackluster insights, but in my opinion they don’t compare to the functionality SMMSs offer. The ability to see the number of clicks per post, total reach and/or engagement combined with Twitter, Linkedin and blog posts, and other advanced metrics simply doesn’t exist using just Facebook’s insights.
• Unique features–I use Thrive as an SMMS and it offers a super cool feature–the ability to create a custom action link on posts without links. You know how, when you post to Facebook, “like,” “comment” and “share” links appear below the post? With Thrive you can add a customized action link such as “donate” with a link to your nonprofit’s donate page, or “shop” with a link to your company’s online store, “take action” with a link to your organization’s advocacy page–whatever action/landing page you want. I’m sorry but it’s just cool, and you can’t do it posting directly from Facebook.

So sure, there’s merit to the arguments that using a 3rd party app to Facebook could potentially affect your Page’s EdgeRank. However, when those arguments are coming from EdgeRank Checker–sorry, I’m skeptical. Especially when their argument against SMMSs include this:

“Posts that are scheduled typically struggle to have high engagement. This is most likely due to the nature of a scheduled update. It’s difficult to create unique engaging content several hours or days in advance. Any negative impacts of scheduled posts are most likely correlations with poorly developed content….Automated content typically performs horrendously, due to lacking human touch and craftsmanship. These types of updates struggle for engagement as is (even if they were manually posted onto Facebook). We highly advise against any automated content on Facebook.”

Sorry but that’s just BS, IMHO. You can think of updates off the top of your head and have them be crap, or you can schedule posts a month out, linking back to evergreen content on your website, that result in a ton of traffic back to your website. Obviously, there’s an element of “real time” to Facebook updates, but there are plenty of pages that achieve high engagement via posts that are created well ahead of time and scheduled. I don’t buy this argument at all–and my experience managing Facebook pages over the past 3 years bears out my skepticism. Content that is scheduled through a 3rd party API doesn’t mean that content is “automated”–it can be as carefully curated as content posted in real time directly to Facebook. The platform from which you post doesn’t dictate the quality of the content you’re posting.

What’s your experience been with posting directly to Facebook versus posting from a 3rd party API? Have you noticed a decline in engagement after switching to an SMMS? Or do you think this whole EdgeRank/3rd party API thing is overblown?

This post was kindly contributed to us by Maggie McGary. Visit her website for more great articles: http://www.mizzinformation.com

One of the most common questions we get here at Sendible is “How does Sendible compare to HootSuite?” HootSuite is a great tool, but it does have limited capabilities for someone who really wants to dive deep into social media as well as online marketing or manage several clients. HootSuite is used primarily as a Twitter tool (although it does more than just Twitter), whereas Sendible is an all-around online marketing tool.

Sendible offers services that HootSuite does not including the ability to offer white label social media management and resell Sendible to your clients under your own brand. We also offer rebranding of your Facebook and Twitter posts so that they won’t say “via Sendible”. I have put together a list of the features and services that Sendible supports as well as those that HootSuite supports below.

In summation, HootSuite is a very useful social media tool, but if you are looking to do more than just basic social media and want to delve into online marketing, Sendible will be your best bet. For an unbiased second opinion, check out Max Goldberg’s blog post entitled “Hootsuite vs. Sendible, or Why Paying To Use Facebook Is Amazing” as well as this comparison post from Inkstained Knuckle.

If you’d like to submit your own review comparing Sendible with other products, please send an email to info@sendible.com and we’ll be sure to link to your site from this post.

A popular question from users of Sendible, the platform for monitoring social media for businesses, is how to post images to a Facebook photo album using Sendible, as seen below:

This is pretty straight forward with Sendible. If you don’t already have a Sendible account, you can sign up for a free trial at http://sendible.com/signup.

Once you’ve signed into your Sendible account, please follow the steps below:

1. Go to Add/Edit Services.
2. Under Social, scroll down to Photo Sharing and select the Facebook Page Album service (click Add).
3. Select your Facebook Page and choose to create a new album every time you post.
   
4. Save your settings.
5. Return to the Message Box and select the Facebook Page Album service you just added.
6. Click the “Subject/Title” button and enter a name for your album.
7. Click the “Photo or File” button and upload as many photos as you like.
8. In the message area, enter the description for your album.
9. Click Send.
   

With Sendible social media management software, you have full control over the link previews that you post to Facebook. A Facebook link preview is the thumbnail image and title, caption and description that appears below a link you post on Facebook.

You can use the following technique when attaching links – this will give you complete control over Facebook link previews:

1.  From Message Box > Compose, click the URL button.
2. Enter the URL (e.g. http://www.facebook.com/snowball.studios) and click Attach.
3. Select the image preview to use and click Attach Link Preview.
4. Then, you can edit the message content and click Send.

We’ve recently added a new way for you to attach URL’s and customize their thumbnail previews when posting to sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

You can choose the thumbnail at the time you attach the link as follows:

1. Compose a new message in the Message Box. 
2. Click URL and enter the URL in the box. E.g. http://www.cookie.com/dealn/25-for-a-50-gift-card-to-toys-r-us—fo…. 
3. Click Attach. 
4. Select the image you’d like to attach with your link and click “Attach Link Preview”.

You can then compose your message.

One of the most popular features on Sendible is the ability to automatically distribute your blog posts to all your social media accounts at once.  Our social media management software does this through the use of an RSS auto-poster. This blog post will explain how this can be achieved.

Step 1: Add your social media accounts

The first thing you’ll want to do is add your social media accounts. You can do this by going to Add/Edit Services where you’ll be able to add your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts as well as many others.

Step 2: Create a group

1. After linking up your accounts to Sendible, go to My Groups and click New Group. Give your group a name and click Create.
2. Once your group has been created, click “Add Contacts/Services…”.
3. Select the services you wish to add to the group and click “Select Contacts/Services”. These are the services that will receive the RSS posts. You can select as many services as you like.

Step 3: Add the RSS autoposter

Now that you’ve added your social media accounts and created a group of services that will receive RSS posts, you can configure the RSS autoposter.

1. Go to Add/Edit Services and select the RSS tab.
2. Click “Add” next to the RSS Auto Poster service.
3. You will then be taken to the page that allows you to configure your RSS autoposter.
4. Complete all the settings, by adding your RSS feed and making sure you select the group you created in Step 2 where it says “Post to the following group”.
5. Click Save Settings for your changes to take effect and Sendible will start distributing your RSS feed.