Behind the Scenes: How I Post on Social Media



This post is part of a series in which Influencers go behind the scenes to explain in detail one aspect of their work. Read all the stories here and write your own (please include the hashtag #BehindTheScenes in the body of your post).

Following me on social media means that you are drinking from a fire hose. I subscribe to the “more is more” philosophy of social-media—meaning that I share approximately ten to fifty posts everyday to provide a constant flow of information, analysis, education, and assistance to my followers.

The NPR Model

I admire NPR because it is an ever-flowing source of great content. Its content is so good that it can run a pledge-drive every few months. This promotion is heinous because it interrupts programming to do the most pedestrian of things: ask for money. And yet we tolerate, if not participate in, the pledge drives!

NPR earns the right to promote its need for money, and this is a beautiful and enviable scheme. My adaptation of the NPR Model is to provide good content that people would not have found, or would have found at great effort, without me. By doing so, I earn the right to sporadically promote Canva, my books, or anything else that I please.

Manual Shares by Me

There are two primary sources for my posts. First, let’s discuss what I do myself. Later I’ll explain how other people post for me.

I use a service called MyAlltop, which is a personalized subset of Alltop.com, a collection of over 1,500 topics containing more than 30,000 RSS feeds. My MyAlltop web page contains the last five stories from websites and blogs of organizations such as Fast Company, Wired, The Atlantic, Boston.com, and NPR.

In addition to MyAlltop, which I customized, Alltop contains over 1,000 topics. On a daily basis, I also read Photography.alltop and Autos.alltop. Alltop can provide you material for almost any topic. Here are more examples: Travel.alltop, Food.alltop, Macintosh.alltop, Social-Media.alltop, and Politics.alltop.

I read MyAlltop and other Alltop pages with my Moto X phone, Nexus 7 tablet, or Nexus 10 tablet. Most of the time I’m accessing it while reading in bed or on a stationary bike because I find selecting material to share an enjoyable and easy task.

When I see a headline that interests me, I click through and scan the full story. If I like the story, I launch the Share menu item in Chrome and share it to a Tumblr blog called Help a Socialist Out (HASO) with only three clicks and no typing. I also use a utility called Andmade to further enhance Android’s sharing ability.

The purpose of HASO is to provide a repository of stories that merit sharing later when I have more time, fully awake, and have a real keyboard. Peg Fitzpatrick, my social-media partner, also shares stories to HASO, so we always have lots of material to share.

You might think that we would keep our collection of future stories to post a secret, but you’d be wrong. HASO is a public blog, and there’s a Mail Chimp email list for it because I want to help other socialists (my choice of word, so deal with it) find good stuff in the spirit of Help a Reporter Out (HARO). If a few million people start using HASO, it might lead to duplication, but that’s a high-quality problem that I don’t anticipate. In the meantime, please use both HASO and my MyAlltop site to find stories worth sharing.

I use Tumblr instead of emailing stories to myself or sharing to a private Google+ circle for several reasons: First, I don’t want any more email. Second, I don’t want my reminders to muck up my social media accounts—even if only I can see what I’ve done. Third, as I just mentioned, I want anyone to have access to HASO. Fourth, Tumblr is the first way that I figured out to make a blog connect to an email subscription service to send a daily email of posts to subscribers.

When I have time and I’m fully cogent, I create posts in this manner:

  • Go to HASO to review the articles that I’ve collected.
  • Click through on the ones that still interest me to go to the source.
  • Create a post for Google+, Facebook, and Twitter by clicking on the Chrome extension for Buffer.
  • Edit the text that was imported with the article.
  • Share with Buffer by “Adding to the Queue.”

Note: one of the consequences of my method is that three platforms contain identical posts. Before you even ask, I have never gotten a complaint about seeing the same posts on multiple platforms. Even if I did, though, I wouldn’t necessarily stop doing things this way.

There’s no doubt in my mind that inclusion of such eye candy increases engagement by a factor of three or four. That said, you may notice that many of my tweets do not have a large picture, graphic, or YouTube video. If there is not a good picture or graphic to be had, then I create one using Canva, the online graphic design company that I work for.

Another kind of post that I manually share is pictures that I’ve taken with my phone (Moto X) or whatever camera I currently own (Nikon D800, Fujifilm X100S, or Sony A7S). I share my pictures for three reasons:

  • I love photography—it’s a Japanese thing.
  • I want to balance my automated posts with something inarguably and intensely personal.
  • I like to help people gain exposure for their food, country, company, product, causes, personal brands, passions, whatever.
  • I’m a lucky guy, and perhaps people want to live vicariously through my adventures.

The Moto X pictures are usually of food, irony, stupidity, or selfies (the four are not the same thing!). The camera photos are usually photo essays of places I’ve visited or conference attendees such at Blogher2014.

I share the Moto X photos with Buffer to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter and sometimes directly to Instagram (because Buffer doesn’t support Instagram). I manually share the photo essays from my camera using Chrome to Google+ and Facebook because there’s no way to automate the creation of embedded albums.

The last kind of post that I manually share is re-shares of other people’s posts. I don’t do this very often because 99% of my effort is on sharing content, not consuming it, so I don’t see stuff that passes my re-share test very often. My richest source for re-sharing posts is the What’s Hot feed on Google +.

Automated and Shares by Others

This brings us to the posts that I don’t share myself. There are two kinds in my accounts. First, there are tweets from HolyKaw. HolyKaw is a website that is manually curated by contributors. They find human-interest stories that should elicit the reaction, “Holy cow!” The headline of every HolyKaw story automatically becomes a tweet with a link to the HolyKaw post. This is tweeted four times, eight hours apart.

I haven’t figured out a way to programmatically embed a picture or graphic in tweets from HolyKaw posts. That would be awesome. And you read this right: identical tweets are made four times. This is because I did tests and observed that when you tweet something four times, you get four or more times the traffic. Only wimps tweet everything only once.

I lied about not doing any other kind of manual post. I also monitor @ mentions of me on Twitter by using Tweetdeck. This enables me to see what people think are my most interesting posts, and when I see any, I’ll post them manually again.

Let me help you wrap your mind around this: people are creating HolyKaw stories that automatically become tweets from me. When I see that a HolyKaw story is popular on Twitter, I’ll manually post the story again to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter—this time with a big graphic! For those of you who are counting, this means that there are five tweets from me for the same story.

The second kind of post that is not shared by me is Peg Fitzpatrick sharing posts as me. She is more meticulous than I am, so her posts always have a big picture, embedded YouTube video, or Canva graphic. She uses similar manual techniques that I use—just in a more perfectionistic way. She’s been doing this so long and so well that she’s better at being me than me.

Conclusion

These are the gory details of how I post. Many people whom claim to be social-media experts do not agree with my practices. Heck, entire agencies do not agree with my practices.

The feeling is mutual.

Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Alltop which contains MyAlltop and HolyKaw. I advise Buffer. I am the chief evangelist of Canva. No one can say I don’t eat my own dogfood.

If you liked this post, please share it and click the FOLLOW button above to get more! And please consider subscribing to my mailing list.

Guy Kawasaki is currently the chief evangelist of Canva and the former chief evangelist of Apple. He's the author of twelve books including APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur — How to Publish a Book,What the Plus!, andEnchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Action. Guy shares enchanting stuff on the topics of marketing, enchantment, social media, writing, self-publishing, innovation and venture capital.

Im looking forward to trying out MyAlltop. Having been debating a tumbler account. This made me see a need for it. Thanks for the tips!

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Dilyana Dobrinova

Brand Strategy Consultant | Personal Psychotherapist | AUBG & HWR Alumna | ASSIST Scholar

8y

Wow! This is a lot of valuable info and helpful tools you mention! Thank you! At our blog at Brand24 we have a series of articles dedicated to helpful online tools for businesses, so we will definitely take an in-depth look into some of these and we might feature some there, too! :))

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Are you sure you have not been cloned, Mr. K? Such valuable information even if I only manage a fraction of all you suggest. Thank you most sincerely, Dr. Lil

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Roberto Cesar Galarza Richle - Marketing Online y Social Media

Social Media Marketing Specialist | Social Selling | LinkedIn Consultant for Personal and Corporate Branding | SEO | Web designer | LION 20k + | Top linked | Open Networker | Global Goodwill Ambassador (GGA)

9y

Thanks Guy. Great Share.

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Loida Rosario

Marketing, communications and innovation executive; multicultural and community leader. Published author and speaker.

9y

Sharing that makes sense, Guy.

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