Publer Review: Treat yourself to an easier social media life

Publer features you’ll love

• 🚀 Content - add, create and automate

  Publer’s post creation features deserve special praise.

  There’s a number of ways to craft posts or importing readymade ones in bulk. The choice includes uploading a good old fashioned CSV file, a simple drag-and-drog of content or pointing to photos on the web, which will import them as individual posts. Another, more automated option, is to point Publer to your RSS feed or the blogs of your favourite sites. Publer will pull in fresh content with a quick refresh (there’s no auto-import, yet) and you can even define which elements of the original post it uses when sharing it on your social feeds. I’m often guilty of hitting publish on an article and moving onto the next before sharing it, so it’s great to have a virtual assistant to do it for me.

  

  You’ll also want to customise your posts depending on the social network. It could be adding photos or emojis to Twitter but keeping LinkedIn more professional. Leading with a photo on Instagram but a video on Facebook. Tweak away!

  Whatever you do, you have full say on when they go out. Easily set your posts to automatically post in sequence, according to the rules you’ve set out, or put them in shuffle mode to mix things up.

  Publer also lets you add a watermark your photos to protect your IP and get the credit you deserve if it’s shared. Also add a location. Append a signature (e.g. URL, hashtag, email address) to every post rather than having to type it out every time. And even post follow-up comment, after a set period of time. The level of customisation and automation here is unrivalled and gives you a real edge.

  

• 📆 Scheduling – with full control or on autopilot

  Time to stop micro-managing your posting schedule!

  You’ve got three options for when your posts go out:

  1. Manually
  2. Auto-scheduling
  3. Recycling/Recurring

  

  The first is self-explanatory, letting you cross-post to all the top platforms immediately.

  The second schedules posts during a pre-set window in the day, such as 1pm-2pm on Mon-Weds. You can go as granular as you like here, even down to different schedules for different post types, so links, photos and status updates could all have their own schedule. These ‘rules’ help to build an automatic schedule that works for you and your business.

  Lastly, there’s repeat posting. Recycle your latest and greatest posts with full say on how often and for how long e.g. every other day, for one month. The one HUGE caveat here is Twitter’s terms of service blocks repeat or recurring posts and there’s only crappy workarounds – unlike MeetEdgar, Publer doesn’t do autovariations. Looking at their product roadmap, you can upvote it as a potential feature but it’s a major blindspot as I type this.

  This level flexibility could be considered overkill but it’s a godsend if you’re looking to post like a pro, without any extra effort. Getting to this point is a significantly better user experience than I’ve seen with any of the other big social media scheduling tools.

• 🤼 Team tools – lighten the load

  Publer has some very basic but important collaboration features.

  Add team members and set their respective admin levels – deciding whether they have posting rights or require approval before being published.

  You can also decide whether they post as themselves or the page owner – handy if you’re working with freelancers and want to keep tabs on who has AAA.

  There’s a lot missing here, but it ticks a box and at least allows teammates to chip in and schedule on your behalf.

• 📈 Analytics – repeat what works

  Any social media manager of worth is tracking effectiveness of posts and able to recite what’s generating exposure, clicks and sales.

  Publer’s analytics are thick and fast. At an account level you can a snapshot of your proficiency i.e. how often you’ve posted) and new followers, or dive down into individual posts to see how they perform across the various platforms. Adding UTM

  Publer can also automatically add UTM parameters at the end of each link so that you can analyse your Publier-driven traffic in Google Analytics. Its in-bult link shorteners do a similar thing, presenting a significant upgrade to MeetEdgar’s rather limited reporting.