How to Automatically Share Your Best Evergreen Content with Edgar

The best evergreen content on your website deserves to be shared more than once. The bigger that back-catalogue of older content gets, though, the more work it takes to keep linking back to it.

So what do you do?

• Keep writing new status updates that go to the same places?


• Save your old updates in some kind of spreadsheet that you keep copying and pasting into a scheduling tool?

Edgar is a social media automation app that allows you to share and re-share links to your best content automatically.

In this post, I’ll give you a closer look at what Edgar does, and how you can use it as either your only social scheduling tool or as a complement to another.

What Does Edgar Do?

Like other social media tools, including HootSuite and Buffer, Edgar allows you to upload your updates so that they can be automatically posted at a later date and time. Edgar sorts your updates into a queue, which shows you what will be posted and when. So far, this should all seem pretty familiar.

There are a number of things that Edgar does differently, however, including one of its most useful features: keeping track of your updates after they’ve been shared, and posting them again at a later date.

Here’s how Edgar works:

When you first sign in to Edgar, you’ll be asked to create certain categories for the different social media updates you share. (You can create as many as you want, as well as change or delete them later.) For example, if you have a large backlog of evergreen content like blog posts, you could break it up into several different categories, like Tool Reviews, Social Media Advice, Case Studies, and so on.

Then, for each social network, you create a schedule, essentially programming Edgar to share updates from certain categories at certain times.

The only thing you have left to do is add social media updates into Edgar. Every time you input an update, you select which networks/accounts you want it to publish on, and what category it belongs to. As of right now, Edgar supports

• Facebook profiles


• Facebook pages


• Facebook groups


• LinkedIn profiles


• LinkedIn company pages


• Twitter accounts

Edgar also gives you the option of scheduling your updates for specific dates and times, as well as adding images.

So far, this isn’t drastically different from what some other social media scheduling tools do. (Though the category-based scheduling does allow you to use analytics to determine what types of updates should be posted at certain times.) The biggest difference comes after Edgar publishes an update.

Tools like Buffer, for example, dump a social media update after it’s posted, leaving you with a finite queue. No matter how full it gets, eventually, it’s going to run out of updates, forcing you to add more manually. (Even if you just copy and paste them from somewhere else.)

Edgar, however, keeps all of your updates cycling in a never-ending rotation. Once an update in any given category is shared, Edgar posts every other update in that category before sharing it again. The app also favors new content over repeats, so you can add updates on a rolling basis. (Edgar comes with a default “Use Once” category where you can save any updates you want to share only once.)

The updates are stored in what Edgar calls the Library, where you can edit and/or delete them at any time. The queue automatically refills itself, so you can always see what’s going to be posted and where for the next two weeks, and you can edit, delete, or shuffle your updates from within the queue, as well.

As a relatively new tool (rollout only began in June 2014), Edgar frequently updates with additional features like its recently-released Chrome plugin. That in mind, can Edgar replace whatever scheduling tool you may be using already?

Most likely, yes. Its simple interface makes it easy to navigate regardless of expertise, and its continually growing number of features show promise. Even if you continue to use another program, though, Edgar’s unique functions make it a valuable complement.

Balancing Different Social Media Tools

I’ve found that Edgar’s ability to repeat content on a rolling basis makes it useful either as your only social media scheduling tool or as an addition to your existing roster of apps. For example, while I use Edgar to continually share links to my best evergreen content, I still rely on HubSpot Social Inbox for my everyday, up-to-the-minute posting.

Social Inbox is equipped with tools that simplify the scheduling process for one-time posts, so you can easily schedule and share timely posts with the added benefit of detailed monitoring.

HubSpot’s deep analytics options allow you to track and review interactions, maintain different conversation threads, and generally keep a better-organized eye on the performance of your posts.

Because it shares data with your other HubSpot tools, it also allows you to review your individual fans and followers in the context of their other interactions with your content. For example, on one single page, you can see a follower’s interactions with your brand on Twitter, their email open rates, their number of visits to your website, and other data, so you can develop a more nuanced understanding of their wants and needs.

These features make Social Inbox and Edgar ideal complements. While Edgar’s ability to save and repeatedly share your updates ensures that you’re always promoting your best content, Social Inbox offers monitoring options that make it easy to track your performance and provide consistent live engagement.

Recap

Continually posting links to your evergreen content is a valuable way of using the work you’ve already completed to drive more new traffic to your site. This type of content doesn’t lose value for your readers, but constantly writing and scheduling new updates to that content eats into your schedule more and more as time goes on.

By using Edgar to automate social media posts linking to your evergreen blog posts, you can continue to share your best content on a rolling basis without making time to repeatedly write and manually schedule updates.

Whether you use it as your sole social media scheduling tool or as a complement to a robust program like HubSpot’s Social Inbox, it affords you more time to use social media the way it was intended: sharing meaningful content and engaging live with your audience.

What do you think? Have you tried Edgar, or HubSpot Social Inbox? Do you have another system in place for linking back to your evergreen content? Let us know in the comments below.

How to Automatically Share Your Best Evergreen Content with Edgar