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Best Practices - Engage: Publish
Best Practices - Engage: Publish

This article outlines the best practices for utilizing the Publish tab in Meltwater Engage for Content Management

Whitney W. avatar
Written by Whitney W.
Updated this week

Publish is the main source to create, collaborate, and schedule content for your social media channels. You can post new messages immediately, schedule them for the future, or save them as drafts. You are able to create posts for multiple accounts, and channels, at once.

This article will outline some best practices for using Publish for your social content management by different use cases.

Best Practices in Publish

Below are the best practices that you should be utilizing for all Publish use cases. For a comprehensive list of channel-specific options in Publish, review this help center article.

Alt Text

Alternative text, or Alt text, is a short written description of an image. It improves accessibility by describing an image with words, for visitors that are unable to see it. It also helps with search engine optimization (SEO). It is recommended to always use Alt Text with your images. Alt text is available for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. When attaching images, click Edit alt text to add to each image.

Bit.ly

Link tracking provides valuable information and analytics about your social content. Link tracking can directly show the relationship between your posts and desired results. By connecting your Bit.ly account to Meltwater, you can automatically shorten and track any attached link you publish. Then, within your Bit.ly account, you can utilize Link Click analytics to review the engagement with the links in your post.

When adding a link, you will see an option to Shorten links, which will automatically use your connected bit.ly account.

More information on connecting your Bit.ly account to Meltwater can be found in this article.

Tags

Tagging your content is a great way to track your outbound message trends, using the Cross Channel Tags report in Analyze. This allows you to segment content by tag, and/or campaign in your reporting. Since you can apply more than one tag per post, it allows for easy segmentation when running reports. It is highly recommended that you tag every post.

When composing a new post, during the final step of 'Schedule and Review' select 'Add Tag'.

Example tag types

  • Campaign tags - tag all posts within a single campaign

  • Product tags - segment by the product and/or service you offer

  • Geo/Language tags - if you post the same message in different languages or geographies

Protip: You can also filter by tag both on the Calendar, and Feed view, to only see the specific content you need to. And if you forget to tag a post, you can use the Brand Posts type filter in Conversations to apply a tag after it is already posted.

Drafts

The Drafts section is where all of your work in progress lives. These are the pieces of content that have been created but are not yet ready for publishing. Whether you are still waiting on approval, do not have the copy finalized, still need creative, etc., drafts offer a flexible way to plan content in advance, while signaling to your team that more work and actions need to be taken.

When creating posts, you have the option to Save as Draft or Schedule a Draft.

Scheduled drafts will live both on the Calendar.

When viewing the Calendar, scheduled drafts will appear with a mango-colored ribbon atop the post card.

Unscheduled drafts, will live under Drafts in the workbench pullout.

You do not need to schedule a date and time for your draft, though it is recommended. If you do not select a date and time, your draft will only appear under "Drafts" in the workbench pullout. Since there’s no date and time associated with an unscheduled draft, we cannot place it on the calendar.

Moving Out of the Draft Stage

To move a draft out of the draft stage and either schedule for later or post now, you'll need to select the edit option. From there, you'll then navigate to the third step of the post-creation workflow and select post now or schedule for later.

For an Unscheduled Draft you have the option to edit or simply drag and drop the post to schedule for the desired time on the calendar.

Drafts use cases

  • Evergreen content - Evergreen content is content that remains relevant regardless of the time of year. Drafts are also a great way to store content that you can use whenever you need to add something to the calendar quickly.

  • Content sharing - if you publish to multiple markets, goes, or countries, drafts can be a perfect place to share content. By creating content and storing it in drafts, team members can copy that content, and localize it for their specific market.

  • Approvals workflow - any rejected, or unapproved content will be stored in drafts. (More below)

Audience Restrictions

Audience restrictions allow you to limit who sees your post based on age, country, region, city, language, etc. This option is available for both Facebook and LinkedIn.

Audience restrictions use cases

  • Location: combine this with the language of your post to customize your message per area

    • Ex. Posting once in English to all of Canada, and the same post in French to only Quebec

  • Age: content that is only available for certain ages

    • Ex. Alcohol, giveaways, etc.

  • A/B testing: create a slightly different message for separate groups, then track the analytics to see which performs better.

Approvals Workflow

Team collaboration is an essential component of content creation. Having another member of your team review social content before its published can help ensure your tone of voice and branding stays consistent.

When creating content in Engage, you have the option to Assign reviewer.

This option sends content into an approvals workflow, that requires the reviewer to either approve or reject the proposed content. Notes can be included with each piece of content, as well as rejection, to allow full collaboration

Protip: any content that is rejected, or not approved by the selected publishing date, will be saved as a Draft.

Mobile App

Expanding on the Approvals Workflow, the Engage Mobile App allows users to approve or reject assigned posts on the go. Under the My Tasks stream, a user can quickly approve or reject content, without needing to be at a computer. This helps speed up content creation and review time.

Review this article to learn more.

💡 Tip

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