Our automation

Echobox can automate most of the heavy lifting carried out by a social media editor.

We will ensure you always have the highest scoring articles in your Schedule queue, shared at the best possible time, taking into account the settings you've configured. The wide range of configuration options enables automation to be customised to the needs of each individual social page.

There is no one size fits all configuration as the right configuration is highly dependent on your content, audience and editorial strategy. Even seemingly similar clients (e.g. large US National News Publishers) may have completely divergent approaches, each ideal for them. For example, one might be comfortable with many reshares and the other might not.

Should Echobox share automatically, or wait for my approval?

Each social page has a Share automatically setting on its Overview with three options:

Option	What happens
Yes	Echobox shares automatically, using your automation settings.
Approvals Only	Echobox prepares posts automatically, but they are only shared once approved.
No	Automation is off for this page.

With Approvals Only, Echobox still picks and prepares your posts, but nothing is shared until someone on your team has approved it. You keep the time savings of automation and stay in control of what goes out.

To change the setting:

Open the social page you want to change and go to its Settings by clicking the icon in the bottom right corner.
Find the Share automatically dropdown.
Choose Yes, Approvals Only or No.
Save your changes.

Yes and Approvals Only are greyed out, with a tooltip, when neither New shares nor Reshares is switched on for the page. Turn on at least one of them first. Choosing No asks you to confirm before automation is switched off.

When a page is set to Approvals Only:

A status strip at the top of the page shows which of the three states the page is in: Sharing automatically, Approvals only or Automation off.
An Approvals tab appears, where posts wait to be reviewed. It only shows when the page is set to Approvals Only.
The Approvals tab shows a message when there is nothing waiting for approval.

The list of pages under Settings → Automation shows a simple on/off toggle for each page, so use the Overview to choose Approvals Only. If you don't see the Approvals Only option, it isn't switched on for your account. Contact support to have it enabled.

What are some best practices?

Post your highest scoring content

Content with higher Echobox Scores will lead to more visitors from social networks.
Echobox will automatically pick your highest scoring content to share.

Reshares are a great way to increase performance

Resharing posts that performed well in the past can be a simple way for you to keep your frequency of sharing high and increase traffic.
Our automation can be configured to make reshares on your behalf.

What are some common ways of using our automation?

Here are some general approaches used by other Echobox clients. It is important to configure your automation based on your content, your audience and your editorial strategy.

Some statistics from our automation users

95% use New Shares
61% use Reshares
57% use both New Shares and Reshares
62% of New Share users - use Optimal mode
73% of Reshare users - use Custom mode

Out of Hours Only

Automated sharing is used to share content outside of core working hours (e.g. before 0900 and after 1700 or on weekends and holidays)
Often used to maintain a social presence outside of core hours, which can be beneficial to overall traffic numbers. Are you making the most of your international audience?
Sometimes used to cover holidays or assist during busy periods

New Content Only

Only used for sharing new content
Allows social teams to spend more time selecting and curating reshares, and/or perform more community management

Reshares Only

Only used for resharing content
Allows social teams to spend more time selecting and curating new content, and/or perform more community management

Approvals Only

Echobox picks and prepares posts using your automation settings, but nothing is shared until someone on your team approves it
Suits teams that want the final say on every post while still saving time on selecting content
Can be combined with any of the approaches above

Full Automation

Running most of the day
Left to identify and share the majority of content
A common use case for publishers with staffing constraints or on secondary pages of larger publications
This gives you maximum time to engage with your community via messages and comments

Should I use Optimal or Custom mode?

Optimal identifies the optimal number of shares to maximise your pageviews from Social. On a daily basis this will be rebalanced to converge to the best level to maximise traffic, though we'll never change share volumes by more than 20% per day. Optimal works well for pages that share more than 20 pieces of content per day.

Custom provides you with more control over our automation.

For New shares, you can set a target number of shares and a maximum article age
For Reshares, you can set a target number of shares, a maximum article age, a maximum number of reshares per article and the minimum time between shares of the same article. You can also choose to only reshare content marked as Evergreen.

CAUTION: Optimal for Reshares AND Optimal for New Shares is generally considered slightly higher risk as it might result in larger proportion of posts being reshares. While perhaps good for pageviews, this is generally not compatible with most editorial strategies.

How do my manual shares affect the “Optimal” or “Custom” settings?

If automation is set to Optimal and you post manually on Echobox as well, the number of shares made automatically will decrease.
If automation is set to Custom and you post manually on Echobox as well, the number of automated shares made by will not change.

How can I block certain types of content from being shared?

Any content with a specified keyword in the URL or RSS Title can be blocked from automated sharing – either for New Shares and/or Reshares.

Some notes on blocking keywords:

Phrases are matched as long as they are entered together
Matches are case INSENSITIVE on keywords and URLs
Keyword blocking can be applied to New Shares and/or Reshares depending on your editorial needs
You may want an article with a certain keyword in the title to go out as a New Share, however, the article may be time-sensitive and should not go out as a Reshare
Editorial foresight needs to be applied to keywords in order to generate a wide safety net of potential keywords and variations thereof to be blocked
Some Echobox users apply blocking for Reshares based on keywords commonly associated with time sensitive articles related to topics including tragedy, murder, accidents, death, terrorism, war, sports, television, film premieres, judicial decisions, awards, events, lotteries, offers, sales, births, weddings, divorce, elections, stock market events and continuously updated live news scenarios

How can I leverage Schedule Periods?

The Schedule Periods can be used to automatically turn automated sharing on and off at different times of the day/week. This can be helpful when using it during out of hours periods.

Selecting specific Schedule Periods will affect the total number of shares. The number will be proportioned based on the number of active hours selected. For example, combining a Custom Share Mode with 20 Daily Shares and setting automated sharing on for 12 hours of the day, would result in approximately 10 articles being shared.

How can I leverage Prefixes and Suffixes?

We can automatically add words or phrases to share messages of posts. This is done with the Prefixes and Suffixes and will apply to all automated shares on that page of that kind (New Shares or Reshares). This feature is often used for Reshares by adding a prefix such as "ICYMI: ".