ViralTag – How to Schedule Your Social Media Content Like a Smart Boss

Let’s face it.

There’s A LOT of stuff to do when you’re running your online business. For instance, here are some of the things you need to do just to produce blog posts and get people reading them:

• Come up with ideas for your blog posts
• Research these ideas
• Create the blog posts
• Create the various images for each blog post (think social media images, featured image, etc.)
• Publish the blog posts
• Promote the blog posts
• Promote the blog posts (yes, I just repeated this one coz you need to do lots of it!)
• Promote the blog posts some more…

You get the idea.

And that’s just related to creating blog posts. You’ve not even touched the stuff you need to do related to creating and launching your products and programs…

Whew! Help!

I sometimes feel like I need to be two octopuses (at the minimum) just to get things done and still keep as sane as possible. Seriously.

So how can you get as much stuff as possible done (and stay sane) even when you cannot (yet) afford or if you don’t want to outsource the tasks?

Today, I want to talk about dealing with the promotion of your blog posts. Remember the task that I repeated a number of times? Yep! That’s the one.

What do you do with your blog posts once you’ve published them?

In the past, I would just sort of leave them on my blog and hope for the best. I would also share them via email to my subscribers, but that was the extent of promoting the blog posts.

Then I realized I needed to do more. As if I didn’t already have enough stuff to do!

So I decided I need to look for ways to automate sharing of my posts as much as I can.

Here’s the thing. There are MANY tools available that you can use to schedule your social media sharing. There are many popular options available, like Buffer, Tailwind, MeetEdgar, SmarterQueue, Hootsuite… Each of these has its strengths or good points. And they’ve been ‘talked about’ by many other people.

So today I want to tell you about another option that you can use that you might not be aware about. And that is ViralTag.

A Few Basics About ViralTag

Unlike many of the other schedulers that seem to only support one or a few social networks, ViralTag supports various social networks including Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook Profiles, Facebook Pages, Twitter, Tumblr, Linkedin Profiles and Linkedin Pages for all the available plans.

ViralTag has 3 main plans: Individual (for 1 user & 10 social profiles), Small Business (for 3 users & 25 social profiles), and Brand (for 5+ users and 50+ social profiles. If you have needs greater than these, you can reach out the ViralTag team to have a customized account created for you. 

For the basic (Individual) plan, your investment can be as low as $24 per month if you pay annually or $29 if you pay on a month-to-month basis. However, don’t let that put you off from signing up with ViralTag. ViralTag has a special offer for bloggers through which you can have a “tamped down” version that supports 3 (instead of 10) social profiles at a much lower price (about $12 at the time of writing this).

Creating Your ViralTag Account

Whichever plan you choose to go with, you can get started with a free 14-day trial. You only need an email address and password to create your account. You don’t need to give your credit card details at this stage.

Once you’ve created your account and logged in, you’ll notice that ViralTag’s menus run along the top and left side. You’ll be able to access most of the things you need using these menus.

Adding Your Social Profiles

Once you’ve created your account, you’ll need to add whatever social media profiles you want to schedule your content to. For instance, you might want to add your Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter accounts or whatever other social media platforms you want to post your content to that are supported by ViralTag.

Doing this is pretty easy.

1. On the left-hand menu, click on ‘Accounts’.
2. Click on the ‘Connect’ button for the social media platform you want to add to ViralTag. Follow the prompts to connect the two accounts to each other
   Repeat for each of the other platforms you want to connect. 
3. Once you’re done, the social media profiles that are connected to ViralTag will be listed. You can disconnect any of the accounts by clicking on the ‘disconnect’ button next to each profile listed.

Now you’re almost ready to start scheduling your social media content. But before you do that…

Install the ViralTag Browser Extension

To make it much easier for you to add posts to your ViralTag schedule, I’d advise that you install the ViralTag Chrome browser extension. You can do this by clicking on the gear icon at the bottom left corner of the ViralTag Menu. This will take you to the ‘Settings’ where you can then select the ‘Extensions’ tab and click on the ‘Install Extension’ button there.

When the extension is installed, you’ll see it on your Chrome browser…

Creating a Posting Schedule

Why should you create a posting schedule?

Unless you want to keep choosing a time and date to post each time, it’s wise to create a schedule before you start looking for content to schedule. It makes it even easier for you when you’re scheduling content because you don’t have to waste time manually entering the date and time. Quick and easy scheduling!

ViralTag allows you to create a posting schedule for each of the social profiles you’ve connected. You can do this either manually by choosing the posting times yourself, or you can let ViralTag create a schedule based on recommended times. They have some kind of algorithm that helps to determine the best times to post to each of your accounts.

I chose to allow ViralTag to recommend a posting schedule for me 🙂 These are the basic steps you need to follow to allow ViralTag to create a posting schedule for you:

1. Click on ‘Posting Schedule’ that you’ll find in the top menu of ViralTag (make sure you’re in your ‘Home’ tab or dashboard to see this menu)Select the social profile you want to create a posting schedule for.
2. Select the social profile you want to create a posting schedule for.
3. Click on the ‘Get Recommended Times’ and follow the prompts to get your posting schedule for that social profile created. Repeat for each of the other social profiles you have in ViralTag.

For my Pinterest account, when I clicked on “Get Recommended Times”, I was required to connect the ViralTag account to my Google Analytics account. After that, a posting schedule was created. I wasn’t asked for anything when I created the posting schedule for my Facebook profile. I’m not sure if that’s because I’d already connected my Google Analytics account, or whether it’s actually normally that easy and straightforward. I’ve not added Twitter and LinkedIn profiles so I don’t know how that will go.

Creating a Feed Made of Your Favorite Content Sources

You probably have a few (or many?) sources of content that you really like – blogs you like reading, social profiles you follow, etc. Instead of trying to remember these sources, you can create a ‘bookmark’ of these social media accounts or websites within your ViralTag account. Think of this as your ‘Feedly’ within ViralTag. Once you’ve added a few sites or social media profiles, you can then visit these feeds whenever you want to look for fresh content to post to your social media accounts.

There are several ways of creating your feeds. You could search for keywords related to what you’re interested in (actually, you should search for keywords related to what YOUR AUDIENCE is interested in). Here’s how you do that:

On the left menu, click on ‘Explore’, then select the ‘Feeds’ tab (the top menu). While in the ‘Feeds’ section, click on the + sign next to ‘Feeds’.

You’ll then be shown a tab on which you can select what type of feed you want to add. To search for feeds using keywords, select one of the feed sources from the top, then choose ‘Search by Topics’. Enter the keyword you’re interested in and either enter or click on the search icon. Add any of the feeds that come up that you’re interested in by clicking on the ‘Add’ button next to it.

Personally, I don’t really fancy this method of adding feeds and prefer adding them manually. This involves entering the actual social media profile url or rss feed url I’m interested in. For instance, if I’m interested in adding a particular website to my feed, I’ll click on the RSS button, then click on ‘Add manually’, then I’ll type the name of the website and its RSS feed url and hit enter or click on the search icon.

Normally, the RSS url for a WordPress website would be in this format:

www.domain.com/feed

The RSS url for a Squarespace website should be in this format:

www.domain.com/?format=rss

Here’s an example of me adding a website I’m interested in to my ViralTag feed:

If you want to add a specific Pinterest account, click on the Pinterest button and enter the profile details. Do the same for any of the others you’re interested in adding (i.e. Etsy, Instagram, etc.).

Once you’ve added the feeds you want to be following, you’ll have a list of them showing up whenever you click on the ‘Feeds’ tab. You can then look at each of them and select the content you’re interested in adding to your schedule. The good thing about ViralTag is that you can do ‘bulk scheduling’ – this means that you can select many pins and add them to your schedule as a batch (more or less). I’ll show you how to do this in a short while.

PSSST! Be sure to include your own websites in the feeds!

 

Scheduling Your Content

Finally, you can now start scheduling your content!! Yay!

There are several ways you can do this, and I’ll mention a few. I’ll let you discover any others that I don’t mention 🙂

The easiest one (according to me) is to browse through the feeds you’ve added and click on any of the content you want to add to your schedule. Click on the ‘Schedule’ button at the bottom right corner once you’ve selected all the content you’re interested in within a feed.

You’ll be taken to the scheduling window, where you can do the following:

1. For each post you want to add to your schedule, choose which social profile you want to post it to. In the case of Pinterest, you also need to choose the board to which you want it posted. You can add a post to as many boards as you’d like.Edit the description if necessary. Sometimes some of the content doesn’t have any description or has spelling mistakes that need to be edited.
2. Edit the description if necessary. Sometimes some of the content doesn’t have any description or has spelling mistakes that need to be edited.
3. Decide whether or not you want the post to be ‘evergreen’. This means that this content will be recycled whenever your schedule runs out of content.
4. Once you’ve done the above for each post, click on the ‘Add all to Queue’. If you’d not created a posting schedule, this is where you’d have manually decided the days and times you want to have each posted. That’s really super manual and very tedious! Please make sure you’ve created a posting schedule before you start scheduling your content! [If you find that there’s content that you’re no longer interested in adding to your schedule, you can click on the little ‘x’ at the top right corner of the post to delete it.]

NOTE: There are other functions like ‘Add to Circles’ that I’ve not addressed. Personally, I think the concept of ‘Circles’ is not useful – but that’s just me. Feel free to explore this on your own and decide whether or not it’s something you’re interested in using. It’s something almost similar to the TailWind Tribes, but on a very teeny tiny scale and hardly worth my investment in time.

The other way of adding content to your schedule is to click on the ViralTag Chrome extension when you’re on a website that has content you like and would like to add to your schedule. Once you click on the extension, the steps to follow are pretty similar to those I already described above.

The third way of adding content to your schedule is by hovering over an image within a website (e.g. when you’re browsing through Pinterest). When you hover over the image, you’ll see the hot pink ViralTag sign (V) that you can click on to add that image to your schedule.

 

There, you have it! Those are the three main ways of adding content to your schedule. The good thing is that you can easily schedule content for a whole week (or even longer) within an hour each week. That will save you lots and lots of time that you’d waste by adding content to your social media profiles one-by-one. Sweet!

I’m not going to discuss EVERYTHING about ViralTag. Honestly, the ViralTag interface is pretty easy to use. Just poke around and you’ll figure it out. And if you find yourself having a challenge, shoot them an email and you’ll get a response within 24 hours (usually within much less than 24 hours).

What I like about ViralTag

1. Creating an account is very easy and straightforward
   ViralTag has good customer service. I contacted them several times and I received a response from them within the same day
2. The ViralTag interface is relatively easy to use
   You can bulk schedule posts, meaning you can add many posts at the same time
3. You can schedule the same post to many social profiles at the same time
4. You can add feeds you want to follow to the ViralTag account to make it easier for you to find content to share
5. You can edit the descriptions of the posts to whatever you want
6. You can also edit the images – there’s a basic image editing software accessible within ViralTag
7. ViralTag connects to Canva, so that if you want to create different social media images you can do so (I haven’t yet tested this feature but I know it’s there. I’ll update this post with my experience if I test it.)
8. You can get basic analytics on your posts to know which ones have good engagement (e.g. those that are repinned most) and also how many followers you have

What Could be Improved in ViralTag

1. I noticed that all the feeds are lumped into one list. I would have preferred if I’d have been able to create feeds for different social profiles, especially where the profiles have distinctly different themes or topical interests
2. When I was still trying to figure out how to add content to the schedule, I muddled up and ended up creating something that’s been saved in the ‘drafts’ tab. I don’t intend to schedule that draft, but I cannot find a way to delete it from the account.
3. While the ViralTag interface is quite easy to use, it might be useful to have tool tips for the different menu items so that users can easily access guidance while navigating.

There could be other things (both positive and negative), but that’s what I’ve come across so far. I’ll add to both lists as I continue experimenting with ViralTag.

So now you know one other tool you can use to schedule your social media posts like a smart boss. So instead of leaving your blog posts to languish in loneliness on your website, expose them to a wider audience by scheduling them to be posted on various social media platforms.

If you want to get your own ViralTag account, click here to get a $15 credit.

Which scheduling tool do you use? What do you LOVE about it? Share in the comments!