Publer: Remarkable & Easy To Use For Social Media Marketing
In my previous blog post, “4 Awesome Marketing Automation Hidden Gems for Your Small Businesses“, I mentioned Publer as one of the hidden gems to help you with your social media marketing.
In this blog post, I am going to provide you with a more in-depth review of Publer & its features.
First, let me circle back to why I decided on Publer over alternatives such as Hootsuite and Buffer.
Publer For Social Media Posting
For sharing your content on social media, there are a ton of options that I’m sure you’re familiar with… I’m thinking of Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social, to name a few. However, these services can cost you a small fortune per month and they don’t even offer all the social network connections that Publer offers.
While evaluating what tool to use for social media network posting, I was determined to find a suite that could offer, at the minimum:
- Customized UTM Tracking per social network so that I could tell where my traffic was coming from in Google Analytics. A lot of popular services don’t offer this functionality.
- Integration with URL Shorteners. I’m sure you’ve heard of Bitly, arguably the most popular URL Shortener. While for a period I tried different URL Shorteners, like Rebrandly, and even purchased a life-time license to Switchy.io, I’ve eventually settled upon sticking with Bitly because, well, they’re the most popular and integrate with practically everything. What made Publer stand out from the crowd was that they integrate with SEVEN URL Shorteners, and you can specify a different service per social network.
- One of the most difficult “must haves” for me was integration with Google Business Profiles. Keeping your Google Business Profile up to date is essential for Local SEO. There aren’t a lot of inexpensive solutions that can post to all the social media networks, including Google Business Profiles.
A “nice to have” feature would be the ability to discover “shareable” content and easily share it with my followers, which is another feature that I get from Publer all for under $35 a month.
How To Use Publer
Publer Makes Social Media Scheduling Easy
When you log into Publer, you’re brought to the “Create” tab so you can easily post to your social media accounts. As you can see from the screenshot above, I currently have Publer connected to the following account types:
- Facebook Page
- Facebook Group
- Google My Business
- Instagram Professional Account
- LinkedIn Personal Account
- LinkedIn Company Account
- Pinterest Business Account
- Twitter Business Page
You can also connect Publer to Facebook & Twitter Personal Accounts, TikTok, YouTube, and WordPress, but I don’t use those integrations at the moment.
I originally had my personal Twitter account connected to Publer, but I received a warning from Twitter about posting duplicate content so now I just retweet my posts, which is like what I do on Facebook: I share my business post with my personal network.
When you type in the content for a post, you’ve given the option to customize each post per social network. This is very important for social media marketing because some social networks cater to hashtags more so than others and the tone of your message may be slightly different depending on the network.
Publer also supports the ability to tag your location for the social media networks that support it. According to SocialMediaToday, posts with a location get 79% more engagement on Instagram!
Use UTM Parameters & URL Shortening
For each social media account you set up with Publer, you can set custom URL/Link Shortening and UTM tracking parameters.
This is also important as some social networks, like Pinterest, frown upon URL Shortening services… and Publer doesn’t allow you to select a service for Pinterest for that reason. I’ve also had mixed experiences with Google Business Profile Posts being rejected because of a shortened URL.
Having your own, branded short link (such as go.ajt.io) is a good idea & statistics show they improve the click-through rate by an average of 34%!
Easily Share Content with RSS Feeds
On the “RSS Feeds” tab you can add RSS Feeds from websites you follow so that if you find something share-worthy, you can easily click on it and share it with your followers!
Final Thoughts
I’ve had nothing but a great experience with Publer and their support team has been super responsive. However, they do lack a few features that I’d love to see in their product. The main two features would be:
- Suggest best times to post per social network
- Have an Android app
Otherwise, anything else they come up with would be like icing on a cake.
So, if you’ve been trying to find the right social media marketing & scheduler for you & your business, try Publer. There’s no time limit for their free plan and it allows you to connect to 5 accounts. If you’re like me, you’ll soon find out that you wish you would have heard about them sooner!
Thanks for reading,
AJ