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Our automation

Echobox can automate most of the heavy lifting carried out by a social media editor.

We will ensure you always have the highest scoring articles in your Schedule Queue, shared at the best possible time, taking into account the settings you’ve configured. The wide range of configuration options enables automation to be customised to the needs of each individual social page. 

There is no one size fits all configuration – as the right configuration is highly dependent on your content, audience and editorial strategy. Even seemingly similar clients (e.g. large US National News Publishers) may have completely divergent approaches, each ideal for them. For example, one might be comfortable with many reshares and the other might not.

 

What are some best practices?

More posts generally means more traffic

  • As long as you're not already posting more than 50 posts per day on Facebook, you should increase your posting volume. Managing a busy Schedule Queue, with new content being published all the time, can quickly become a time consuming process.
  • Sudden changes in posting volume or frequency can cause social network algorithms to penalise you. 
  • Echobox can determine what the optimal frequency and volume of sharing is for a particular social account. Simply select Optimal to allow a slow adjustment to the right amount of shares for you.

Post your highest scoring content

  • Content with higher Echobox Scores will lead to more visitors from social networks.
  • Echobox will automatically pick your highest scoring content to share.

Reshares are a great way to increase performance

  • Resharing posts that performed well in the past can be a simple way for you to keep your frequency of sharing high and increase traffic.
  • Our automation can be configured to make reshares on your behalf.

 

What are some common ways of using our automation?

Here are some general approaches used by other Echobox clients. It is important to configure your automation based on your content, your audience and your editorial strategy.

Some statistics from our automation users

  • 95% use New Shares
  • 61% use Reshares
  • 57% use both New Shares and Reshares
  • 62% of New Share users - use Optimal mode
  • 73% of Reshare users - use Custom mode

Out of Hours Only

  • Automated sharing is used to share content outside of core working hours (e.g. before 0900 and after 1700 or on weekends and holidays)
  • Often used to maintain a social presence outside of core hours, which can be beneficial to overall traffic numbers. Are you making the most of your international audience?
  • Sometimes used to cover holidays or assist during busy periods

New Content Only

  • Only used for sharing new content
  • Allows social teams to spend more time selecting and curating reshares, and/or perform more community management

Reshares Only

  • Only used for resharing content
  • Allows social teams to spend more time selecting and curating new content, and/or perform more community management

Assisted (co-pilot)

  • Running most of the day
  • Users monitor the Schedule Queue - removing some scheduled posts, manually posting additional content
  • Echobox won’t reschedule something you manually delete for at least 30 days
  • Any curations you make to items in the Schedule Queue will be preserved if the scheduled item is shared (although bear in mind we can still remove it unless you "Force Share" it)

Full Automation (auto-pilot)

  • Running most of the day
  • Left to identify and share the majority of content
  • A common use case for publishers with staffing constraints or on secondary pages of larger publications
  • This gives you maximum time to engage with your community via messages and comments

Should I use Optimal or Custom mode?

Optimal identifies the optimal number of shares to maximise your pageviews from Social. On a daily basis this will be rebalanced to converge to the best level to maximise traffic, though we'll never change share volumes by more than 20% per day. Optimal works well for pages that share more than 20 pieces of content per day.

Custom provides you with more control over our automation. 

  • For New shares, you can set a target number of shares and a maximum article age
  • For Reshares, you can set a target number of shares, a maximum article age, a maximum number of reshares per article and the minimum time between shares of the same article. You can also choose to only reshare content marked as Evergreen.

CAUTION: Optimal for Reshares AND Optimal for New Shares is generally considered slightly higher risk as it might result in larger proportion of posts being reshares. While perhaps good for pageviews, this is generally not compatible with most editorial strategies. 

How do my manual shares affect the “Optimal” or “Custom” settings?

  • If automation is set to Optimal and you post manually on Echobox as well, the number of shares made automatically will decrease. 
  • If automation is set to Custom and you post manually on Echobox as well, the number of automated shares made by will not change.

 

How do I make sure Breaking News gets shared as soon as possible?

Echobox has an effective Breaking News Detection Engine built into the platform. Echobox will recognize breaking news and share within 15 minutes. Although this process works well for most Echobox users, it might miss certain specific breaking news. To ensure it captures all your breaking news, you can specify keyword rules. Any content with a specified keyword in the URL can be set to be shared as soon as possible (this can be done by adding a keyword to Automation > Page > New shares > Keywords: share as soon as possible). 

 

CAUTION:

  • This will supersede any other keyword rules
  • Even if New Share Mode is Off, content matching this criteria will still be shared
  • The post won’t be timing optimised
  • Echobox can't determine an optimal volume because it will just share all content that matches your specific keywords
  • It removes our ability to increase your traffic for these posts because it must share 100% of this content immediately
  • As soon as possible means as soon as Echobox has retrieved your latest content from your RSS feeds, which might take up to 15 minutes. This means that if 2 articles are published within the same 5 minute period, it will share one post immediately after the other, potentially hurting the performance of both posts (and cannibalise each other’s performance)
  • Echobox won't be able to exclude content from being shared

 

How do I make sure Breaking News isn’t shared late?

Content automatically classified as Breaking won’t be shared more than 1 hour after its publication time. If this timeframe isn’t suitable for you it can be customised by discussing with your Customer Success representative. It is also possible to customise the maximum allowable share time for content classified as Normal. However, this can reduce the effectiveness of Echobox’s optimised sharing.

 

How can I block certain types of content from being shared?

Any content with a specified keyword in the URL or RSS Title can be blocked from automated sharing – either for New Shares and/or Reshares.

Some notes on blocking keywords:

  • Phrases are matched as long as they are entered together
  • Matches are case INSENSITIVE on keywords and URLs
  • Keyword blocking can be applied to New Shares and/or Reshares depending on your editorial needs
  • You may want an article with a certain keyword in the title to go out as a New Share, however, the article may be time-sensitive and should not go out as a Reshare
  • Editorial foresight needs to be applied to keywords in order to generate a wide safety net of potential keywords and variations thereof to be blocked
  • Some Echobox users apply blocking for Reshares based on keywords commonly associated with time sensitive articles related to topics including tragedy, murder, accidents, death, terrorism, war, sports, television, film premieres, judicial decisions, awards, events, lotteries, offers, sales, births, weddings, divorce, elections, stock market events and continuously updated live news scenarios

 

How can I leverage Schedule Periods?

The Schedule Periods can be used to automatically turn automated sharing on and off at different times of the day/week. This can be helpful when using it during out of hours periods.

Selecting specific Schedule Periods will affect the total number of shares. The number will be proportioned based on the number of active hours selected. For example, combining a Custom Share Mode with 20 Daily Shares and setting automated sharing on for 12 hours of the day, would result in approximately 10 articles being shared.

 

How can I leverage Prefixes and Suffixes?

We can automatically add words or phrases to share messages of posts. This is done with the Prefixes and Suffixes and will apply to all automated shares on that page of that kind (New Shares or Reshares). This feature is often used for Reshares by adding a prefix such as "ICYMI: ".