What is Evergreen?
We continually try to update our audiences with the latest and fresh content to help them visualize what’s new in the industry. However, we must also remember the phrase “old is gold” and keep refreshing their memory with universally true content.
Every industry has evergreen content like movies, songs, and theater. Take for example The Godfather, Billie Jeans, and Romeo and Juliet. These are bound to generate engagement whenever shared on relevant platforms.
Evergreen Content
In a race to provide new tactics and strategies, we tend to forget tried and tested ones which need reminding in the form of evergreen content. Evergreen content comprises of those articles which are impermeable to time. They have stood the test of time and are unaffected by the fluctuations around them.
Look for the content in your library which is popular among the audience. One way to do this is to evaluate which articles get the most shares and likes over time. A must-have criterion is that the content in question must be at least a few months old to be revisited.
The Evergreen Feature
The evergreen feature in ContentStudio allows you to publish top-performing content. In other words, if you want to keep certain content afresh in your newsfeed so it appears multiple time at set intervals with predefined posting time and date, evergreen is the perfect resource for you.
Often a piece of news or a post is trending for months on. If you desire to keep a certain topic in your reader’s mind, keep posting it.
With Evergreen feature, we have eliminated the hassle of republishing top content. Simply create a couple of social posts, set posting frequency and interval, and that’s it, the evergreen automation recipe will do the rest for you.
Below mentioned are some of the ways you can customize your recurring posts.
How to Recycle Posts using Evergreen Automation Recipe
Using the evergreen automation recipe, you can create highly customized campaigns by setting up a variety of filters and rules according to your needs.
Simply navigate to Evergreen recipe in automation module. Click on the new campaign if you already haven’t created one, and name it appropriately. Select the social media platforms that you want the post to be regularly published to from the provided list.
Press the next button to add the posts you want to publish recursively. Click on the add post button and paste the URL of the article. You will see all the standard options that you get in the social post composer.
This includes adding images, videos, hashtags, link shortening, and UTM parameters. It is important to note here that you need at least 2 posts to be able to use evergreen automation.
Headline Variations
In the previous evergreen version, you would always get the same headline text whenever the content was published. This gave a sense of duplication. This build of evergreen has eliminated this problem by introducing the concept of headline variations.
When you have added an article in the evergreen stream you will see the options of add variations and auto-generate variations. As the name suggests you can manually write each heading for the number of times the post will be repeated or the system can generate them for you.
Here you can see the type of variations and select or remove as per need. This gives a fresh sense of perspective to the reader each time the old content is shared.
The next step after adding your posts is to set the posting interval and cycle gap between the posts.
Schedule Time: Going forward next step is to set a time for your automation, you can repeat them with a recurring option on specific intervals, or you can set your own custom time.
Schedule Type: Whether you want your automation to start from today or any other time you can manually set.
Cycle Gap: As this recipe is designed for your post recycling, you will have to define a Cycle Gap as you can see in the above image, it will recycle all of your posts once content has been published. As per the above image, the campaign will resume after a gap of 1 day.
If you do not want to have any gap, simply uncheck the “Cycle Gap” option and start publishing content continuously without any gap.
There are however a few pointers to keep in mind while using this feature.
- You can only schedule social posts in evergreen, not blog posts
- Twitter has recently disallowed repetitive posts, so evergreen does not work for Twitter. However, we are working on the Twitter variations that will be added in the next few weeks.
- You can upload images from your computer, also you can enhance them by using Adobe Creative Cloud integration once the image is uploaded.
- You need to add at least 2 posts in a recurring loop to be able to use this functionality
- Any video you desire to put along with your message
- You can create your own image right away using our built-in Image Editor
- You can add your Replug Call To Action (CTA) with your content
Use Case – 1
Let us explore the recurring post scheduling option
Below image shows the sample posts which we will be using in our campaign
The names of the two posts are “Email design trends” (which we will refer to as post-A) and “How to use Medium (will be referred to as Post-B). Time and date when we wrote this piece was 12:58 pm, Thursday, 4/7/2019 (just to give you a time reference). The start date of the campaign is the same as above.
Post A will be published 5 days from the time/date of creation of this campaign
Post B will be published 5 days after the time/date of publishing of Post A
Then there is a gap of 3 days referred to as a cycle gap. The cycle gap occurs when a complete campaign is successfully completed. Our test campaign has 2 posts.
If the “Schedule Type” option is set to “ Run this campaign continuously starting today” option, which is our current test case, Post A will be published 5 days from the time/date of creation of this campaign
If, however, “Schedule type” is set for “set a start and end date” Post A will be published on the mentioned time and date, even if it is before the time/day mentioned in “schedule time” option
Use Case – 2
Let us now take the custom time scheduling option in which all the options are simultaneously being used.
For the sake of simplicity, the same 2 posts are being considered as in case-1. Time and date when we wrote this piece was 12:58 pm, Thursday, 4/7/2019 (just to give you a time reference). The start date of the campaign is the same.
Post A will be published Thursday, 4/7/19 @ 14:20 pm
Post B will be published Thursday, 4/7/19 @ 16:10 pm
Now there is a cycle gap of 5 days, skipping Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday till 16:10 pm. The first time slot of Tuesday is therefore skipped by a margin of 5 min since it is @ 16:05
Post A will be published on Tuesday, 9th July 2019 @ 18:40
Post B will be published on Thursday 11th July 2019 @ 14:20
Note: If schedule type is set to “run this campaign starting today option” Post A will be published on the first available time slot. If it is set to “set a start and end date” Post A will be published on the first available time slot on the mentioned time and date.
Upload Posts in bulk
You can also use the Bulk upload via CSV option to add multiple posts at once in the evergreen campaign.
The purpose of Bulk upload is to allow users to add multiple posts with just one click. What you can do is add “message”, “image URL” and “link” of multiple posts in an excel sheet and simply just upload the sheet by clicking the bulk upload button.
If you have any questions regarding the Evergreen feature, drop a comment below.
