Automate your social media content using Hootsuite Publisher

Automate your social media content pipeline with curated content while you’re busy working on original content.

While it’s extremely important to maintain a strong content pipeline for our social media profiles, most of us are too busy to find good content, schedule and publish it manually. Hootsuite Publisher is an excellent tool to solve this problem. This works for curated content and you can choose blogs of your choice. Hootsuite will pick the blog posts and post them on your social media channels for you!

Do not use this an excuse to NOT create original content. Original, high-quality content is king!

Here’s how this works:

Go to your Hootsuite dashboard > Click on the Publisher menu from the left menu bar.

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Hootsuite dashboard menu

Once you’re in the Publisher > Go to the RSS feeds link under the “Content Sources” sub-heading under the “Publisher” heading.

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Hootsuite publisher menu

Once you have the RSS Feeds pop-up, click on the Add New Feed (+) icon:

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Hootsuite RSS feeds pop-up

You can now enter the feed details and the posting method with frequency:

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Hootsuite Add a RSS feed options

Here’s a guide to fill in the form shown above:

  • Feed URL: RSS feed URL of the source blog where you want to get the posts from.
  • Network to send feed: These are the channels where the blogs (picked from the above feed) will be posted on.
  • Check this feed every: Hootsuite will check if there are any new blogs in the feed based on the frequency you enter here.
  • When new posts are found: You can post 1 to 5 posts at a time by selecting the option here.
  • Include text: This can be unchecked as most blogs will have long titles. If checked, it will pull the text from the blog’s body in the social media post text.
  • Prepend text: You can use a keyword or hashtag in this field to improve your post reach. Can also be left blank.

Once you click on Save Feed, Hootsuite gets to work and automates your social media profiles for you. No scheduling or review needed.

Here’s an example for the HubSpot’s Marketing blog feed I have configured for my (old) Twitter handle.

You can also configure feeds for your organization’s social media profiles by selecting the business name from the drop-down in the feeds popup:

This is a good way to keep your social media accounts active. Though it’s always preferable to create your own content that is original. At the same time, make sure if you’re using curated content, it should be high quality and from genuine websites.

You can use the same method to configure your own blog’s feed on Hootsuite so you don’t have to manually share your content each time you publish something new.

Being said, there are always some drawbacks to automating, especially in terms of the level of customization. So, always analyze the trade-off, and then decide for yourself!

6 thoughts on “Automate your social media content using Hootsuite Publisher”

      • Hi Emily,
        Should also try Blog2Social as it is user friendly.
        So far i have faced no issues. Not only you have a single dashboard which will help you post across platforms but also it requires no cron job done. You just have to simply install and activate it.

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