The Tweetily plugin for WordPress is a godsend for auto-sharing your evergreen content.
If like me, you have content that was written long before the current social media platforms were created, a lot of your content has probably gone unshared. If that content is able to stand the test of time (evergreen), then there’s absolutely no reason not to share it now.
What is evergreen content?
Evergreen content means content that won’t quickly become out of date within a short period of time. How-to guides, recipes, reviews, observations on life and articles about historical facts can be considered evergreen.
Breaking news isn’t evergreen content as it’s usually bitty information written as the news is unfolding. However, if the article tracks the events in the form of a timeline and has a summary or conclusion, then this could be considered evergreen.
Why is it important to share evergreen content?
As part of it’s Hummingbird update in 2013, Google started to take social sharing into consideration as a sign of content quality.
This means that the more people that are sharing your content – evergreen and current – across social media, the more often your content will appear in search results. It goes without saying that it all adds up to more visitors to your blog.
So you’ve written all this fabulous content over time but you’ve never shared it. It’s time to blow the dust off and put the information out there with the help of Tweetily.
Setting up Tweetily
From your WordPress plugins page do a search for Tweetily and install it in the usual way. Once activated a new menu item will appear called ‘Tweetily’ naturally. Click on this to configure your settings.
The first thing you need to do is connect Tweetily to your Twitter account. You can only connect one account.
Once connected go through the settings and decide whether you want to tweet your post title only, post body only or both post and body. As I use Twitter Cards, I chose post title only.
Next decide if you want additional text added to the tweet for example, ‘PLZ RT’ or ‘In case you missed this.’ This can be added to the beginning or end of the tweet. You can also choose not to have any additional text; the choice is yours.
Connect to Bitly
If you choose to include links in your tweets (and why wouldn’t you?) Tweetily gives you the option to use URL shorteners. If you’ve set up vanity URLs with Bitly then make sure you connect Tweetily to your Bitly account.
When you tick yes to include links, an option box appears asking if you want to use URL shorteners. Tick it.
- A drop down box appears with a list of URL shortener services, click on Bitly.
- Two more boxes appear asking for your Bitly username and API key.
- To find your username, log in to Bitly and go to Settings ->Advanced. Both your username and API key will be in boxes near the end of the page.
- If your username doesn’t appear there then go to your Public Profile (Settings -> Public Profile).
- Looking at the URL in your browser you will see a link that looks something like this: https://bitly.com/u/o_5ivagqtvj9 – the part at the end after the / is your username: o_5ivagqtvj9.
- Copy and paste the information into the Tweetily boxes.
Further down you can choose the time between tweets and how many tweets should be sent at any one time. There is also the option to tweet posts or pages; FYI the pages option doesn’t work as yet so stick with only posts.
Time to tidy up your categories
There is the option to exclude categories from being tweeted. If your evergreen content is scattered over many categories there is the option to exclude posts as well. This can be time-consuming if you have hundreds of pages so it’s a good idea to look at how your blog is structured and maybe rework your categories.
If like me, you post updates on things, then it’s a good idea to create a new category called news or something and file all your industry updates or breaking news under that category. You can then tell Tweetily to exclude that whole category. Moving posts to a new category can be time-consuming but it will be worth it in the end.
When you’re done with the settings click on the ‘Update Tweetily Options’ button. It’s a good idea to test that everything is working so go ahead and click on the ‘Tweet Now’ button. Tweetily will tweet a random post from your blog.
If everything is working to your satisfaction sit back, relax as Tweetily chooses a random post to tweet at your scheduled intervals.
Similar plugins to Tweetily include:
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