What is Evergreen?
The evergreen feature in ContentStudio allows you to publish recurring content in future by scheduling it today. 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 news or a post is trending for months on. If you desire to keep a certain topic afresh in your reader’s mind, keep posting it.
With Evergreen feature, we have eliminated the hassle of composing recurring posts. Simply create a social post, set its parameters and that’s it, evergreen 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.
- Go to Automation icon on the left side panel of ContentStudio dashboard. Select “Evergreen” from the list of recipes provided.
- Click on the new campaign if you already haven’t already created one, and give it an appropriate name. Select the social media platforms that you want the post to be regularly published to from the provided list.
Now comes the interesting part, we have thought of every possible use case and provided our users with a detailed roadmap of how and when they want to publish a post.
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 basically 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 with a gap of 5 days.
If you do not want to have any gap, simply uncheck the “Cycle Gap” option and it will be publishing content continuously without any gap.
There are however a few pointers to keep in mind while using this feature.
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- 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 name of my two posts are “wish you a great 2018” (which we will refer to as post A) and “Happy new year to all (will be referred to as Post B). Time and date when we wrote this piece was 12:58 pm, Thursday, 9/8/2018 (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, yours might have 8
- 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 custom time scheduling option in which all the options are simultaneously being used.
The name of my 2 posts are “wish you a great 2018” (which we will refer to as post A) and “Happy new year to all” (will be referred to as Post B). Time and date when we wrote this piece was 12:58 pm, Thursday, 9/8/2018 (just to give you a time reference). The start date of the campaign is the same as above.
- Post A will be published Thursday, 9/8/18 @ 14:20 pm
- Post B will be published Thursday, 9/8/18 @ 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, 14th Aug 2018 @ 18:40
- Post B will be published on Thursday 16th Aug 2018 @ 14:20
The posting cycle ends Wednesday, 22 Aug 2018 @ 14:00 Hours to your local time.
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
While creating your post in evergreen, Step 4 takes you to compose your post section. There you will see an option “Bulk Upload” see screenshot below.
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.
Remember the format of the files and links has to be the same as mentioned in the example template.
Edit a previously created Evergreen Campaign
Editing a previously created evergreen campaign can be done from 2 channels, one from composer module, the other from discovery module.
Let start with the composer, click on the “Composer” icon from the left-hand pane of the ContentStudio dashboard.
Select “Social Media Post” icon. Remember that evergreen feature is not available for blog posting as it will create duplicate content. After selecting social media post following screen will appear.
Using composer module to edit previously created Evergreen Campaign. Compose your post and choose the evergreen campaign that you want your current post to be added to
After selecting your campaign you will see two options “apply changes from next cycle” and “apply changes now and restart cycle”
- If you choose “apply changes from next cycle”, your current evergreen campaign will be completed, the cycle gap will be completed, and your latest post created in composer will be added at the end of the list
- If you choose “Apply changes now and restart cycle”, The current evergreen campaign will stop at once. A new post list will be created including your current post and the cycle will restart from the first post
- You can always change the order of the post by dragging and dropping a post up and down
Click on “Add to Evergreen” button on the right top corner of your screen to add this post
Add content to Evergreen Queue from Discovery
Go to the discovery module by clicking the magnifying glass icon on the left-hand pane of ContentStudio dashboard.
Search for your desired post by searching keywords, exact phrases and or domain. Choose the post that you like and wish to share. Click on the share button and select social post.
You will be redirected to the following page
Select the already existing evergreen campaign you want the post to be added to. Select whether to “apply changes now and restart cycle” option or “apply changes from next cycle. Click on “Add to evergreen” on the right top corner of your screen to add this post to your campaign.
If you have any questions regarding the Evergreen feature, drop a comment below.
