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More Time For Fun – Social Media Automation For Travel Bloggers

#BloggerHacks – How To Spend More Time Travelling and Blogging. Learn how to easily set your social media accounts growth on autopilot and use your time on things that actually matter!

Confession: I am a BIG fan of automation. Social Media Automation for your travel blog or website is exactly what will give you MORE TIME to spend any way you want. Travel, Self-Care, Fun & Adventure with your family while your online presence grows on auto-pilot! My 3yo son absolutely loves it!!!

Social media automation for blogs is indeed a hot topic. But I am having trouble finding easy hands-on instructions on not just what you should be doing, but on exactly HOW you do it, what and how social media automation tools are to be used. Hopefully, I can help fellow beginner travel, outdoor and adventure bloggers to figure out the basics.

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• Travel Blogging for Dummies
• Instagram Automation
• Facebook Automation
• Pinterest Automation
• Twitter Automation
• Blogging Help

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Travel Blogging for Dummies

Our family loves adventure and are active travelers and hikers, plus we happen to live in Beautiful British Columbia. What an amazing place to be if you are inspired to start your travel blog!

I've been spending countless .. I mean it. Countless hours on telling my friends all about our trips, and answering questions on the best places, best gear, how to travel with a baby, how to take and edit pictures yadayadayada… I was tired. The result = This Family Travel Blog! Now I use both – a professional website and social media tools for blogs to tell my story.

So you want to start your travel blog? How to promote your blog on social media? Where do you even begin?..

When I decided to write a travel blog I had no clue. This FREE 5-day Email Course on How To Start a Blog was a gem find! It helped me to get my WordPress travel blog up and running in no time!

Now what? How do I grow it? How do I spread the word without being sucked into my phone and on social media 24/7?

At first, I've been publishing a post, adding it to my social media channels with like 5-10 followers, mostly my friends and my mom, and then obsessing over the analytics for hours… Sounds familiar? So much time wasted on the internet and social media! When would you have time to actually… travel? I was tired and disappointed. There must have been another way!

There IS another way! #LoveTechnology

I took this blogging course – Blogging Blastoff. Yes, it is a PAID course, but in my opinion, is worth the investment 100%. I've done so many e-Courses in my life, and I can tell you this one is worth it. I've learned so much! Plus they run Facebook Group community that is super supportive and they answer any questions within 24 hours.

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Instagram automation

To be successful on Instagram you need to know few rules.

Rule One: Regular Posting

To be treated a “quality feed” you'd need to be posting content at regular intervals at the same time, aka create a pattern. That means every 1-2-3 days, at the SAME time.

I've tried catching up with manually posting on Instagram at the regular schedule.. good luck with that! You constantly forget, or your photo is not ready, or life happens.. it is hard to be consistent.

I have tried many for scheduling tools, but so far here is Planoly – the absolute best tool for Instagram on the market!

Planoly has both: web-app and mobile app! So it's super-convenient to upload pictures on mobile and then type in and edit captions in the browser. Plus the HUGE value add it their IG grid preview tool – where you can play moving your images around to achieve the perfect look and then schedule it out!

Another value-add to Planoly is IG posts automation to Facebook – once your photo gets posted, it posts to FB as well.

Rule Two: Uniform Look

To be attractive to followers your feed should have a uniform look.

I was overwhelmed with some other accounts which have stunning pictures, the amount of different filters and presets you can get.. So much money… ..and hey then you need to learn how to use those..

But don't worry, it IS possible to create an amazing feed just using your phone and one or two apps. The key is consistency.

All of the pictures I am posting on my Instagram accounts now are done with my iPhone. yes, with my simple iPhone. I am using a simple FREE app called Snapseed for editing. It has manual tools, but also some good quality presets. Hence each picture that I am opening up in Snapseed takes 10 seconds to edit:

1. resize to square,
2. apply a filter (same every time)
3. minor fine-tuning (for example for portraits)
4. add text if required – once again Snapseed has a collection of predefined text styles. Stick to one or two of them for your images for a uniform look.
5. save a copy – very important to save a copy as a new image and not override the original source.

That's it! Done! 10 sec for your social media Instagram pictures automation.

There is a different tool I am using to create uniform images for my blog posts in different sizes specifically for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and for the post feature image – all using templates and auto re-shapes. I'll talk about it separately in another blog. For reference, the name is Canva.

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Rule Three: Engagement is the key to success.

Engagement means interaction, following people, commenting on their posts, liking their comments, responding to their comments and direct messages.

I've spent hours on follow/unfollow game, went to … sooo much stress.. and sooo much time wasted. A quick calculation (#sorrynotsorry I am a numbers person) if I am spending one minute in reading someone's post/comment, liking it, and responding to it, if all I do is just comment and respond on IG, I can do a maximum of 1,440 quality engagements per day:
60min x 24 hours = 1,440

A good engagement rate for an account should be 2% or more. at this non-stop engagement I can manage an account of 72,000 followers. Tops. How do big brands do it?!!….

ANSWER: AUTOMATION!!!!!

I confess I do use an automation tool – Ingramer – to manage my engagement. The account set up takes few minutes: you'd need to connect your Instagram account, and set up targeting: hashtags and user profiles of your competitors or similar accounts that have your audience, and the tool will start targeting that audience.

Ingramer then plays the follow-unfollow game for you on automation! It follows accounts and unfollows those who do not follow you back. It also likes the posts of my followers, watches the stories for me, likes comments on my follower's posts, etc.

All I have left with is replying to comments on my posts and to my direct messages! Which I absolutely love doing and would never give up to any automation tool. ever. How cool is that?!

Do you know how much time it takes for me to manage Instagram now? No more than 30 minutes per day! Plus I spend a few hours each 2nd week on pre-scheduling posts for the next 2-3 weeks. Done! Thank you Ingramer!

I have all this time left to spend with my family! and my Instagram is running by itself, driving traffic to my blog and growing in following! My 3yo son LOVES IT!

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Facebook automation

Facebook is one of my favorite platforms, but also the hardest one to get organic engagement from a business page. Same rules as IG apply: quality content, engagement and regular activity.

Did you know Facebook doesn't like outbound links dropped instead of posts? ‘Cuz it doesn't want Facebook users to click away, so the algorithm penalizes your reach if you just schedule blog links. Instead, it is recommended you post 2-3 pictures, a video or a slide-show and then add a link to your post either in the description or in the comments section.

I've tried to publish posts on my page at regular time, or as soon as I publish the blog… I've also tried to post in groups to attract FB followers.. it took a lot of manual labor.

Yes, you can use a generic social media automation tool to schedule for Facebook, but bad news – Facebook can easily detect it, and although they allow schedulers, their algorithm will penalize you for it. They will not show your post to as many of your followers as you'd like them to.

Good news: Facebook has its own built-in publishing and scheduling tools! Believe it or not, I am using just that – Facebook internal publishing tools to schedule posts into both: our PerfectDayToPlay Facebook page and our BC Hiking Group. Even better – their internal tools are free!

Once you get a hang of this publishing tool, you can schedule your posts for the other groups you're a part of too! Let's say if a group allows advertising on the 1st and 15th of the month only – you can preschedule your ad-posts for the whole year! it will only take you an hour or so to do it, and then the whole year is free and only responding to comments. How cool is that?!

Oh and by the way – Planoly the tool I am using to schedule Instagram, has an option to co-post your Instagram photos to your Facebook Page automatically! Use it!

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Facebook Groups

A quick word about Facebook Groups: although it is currently impossible to automate posts into Facebook Groups managed by others, using Facebook Groups for your blog promotion is one of the best strategies to get the word out there!

Check out my blog article Top Fifty Travel & Blogging Facebook Groups to Quickly Boost Blog Traffic & SEO. In it, I’m going to let you in on a secret to how to get more engagement, more followers and more genuine readership with the help of Facebook Groups for Travelers and Bloggers. Travel Facebook groups will help inspire your adventures; while in joining Blogging Facebook Groups you can become of a larger community of travel bloggers, who collaborate and support each other.

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Pinterest Automation

I am currently using Tailwind to schedule content for Pinterest, they are the proven leader when it comes to Pinterest. The price is reasonable as well considering the amount of time you are saving!

Absolute Best feature ever: Smart Loops functionality – that's a “set it and forget it” tool. Once you have 30-50 posts of your core content, you'd feed those into one of the Smart loops, and it can circulate in perpetuity!!!

You can also set up an auto-retweet tool, so once you post a pin through Tailwind, it automatically tweets your pin into your Twitter account. Awesome! Cheers for more social media automation!

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Twitter automation

Twitter is the one social media network I most struggled with, although it is said to be the easiest one. I've been using a number of tools to schedule posts and software apps designed specifically for boosting Twitter.

I've recently started using TweetFavy – a tool similar to Ingramer that I'm using for Instagram follow/unfollow automation. I love the results so far. TweetFavy is one of those “set it and forget it” social media automation tools.

I've also read about a plugin into your WordPress site called Revive Old Posts – will be trying it on our site this month. Basically this plugin retweets your old posts with links and pictures into your Twitter on your schedule and in perpetuity.

Another tool that I've started using is IFTTT (If This Than That) automation – a unique tool that uses Applets to connect networks together. I am now using it for all sorts of social media automation: Facebook to Twitter, Instagram to Twitter, Facebook to Evernote, Facebook to Tumblr, Instagram to Tumblr, and more. Love it! Each time my Instagram post goes out, for example, IFTTT tweets it together with the actual picture (not just the link!) on my Twitter.

Check out my recent post on Twitter Automation: How To Quickly Grow Blog Following on Twitter with Automation & Scheduling Tools

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Help For Travel, Outdoors, and Adventure Bloggers

I am a big believer in helping each other. As a travel blogger or a business owner who needs help with figuring out social media automation, I think the best way is to ask the other travel, outdoor and adventure bloggers who've already nailed it!

That is why, if you need help setting up your travel blog or website, I do once again recommend Blogging Blastoff 30-day crash course, which will give you everything from A-Z when it comes to your online presence AND ACTUALLY MAKING MONEY on your blog and social media channels!

Frankly it took me longer than 30-days: it took me two months to complete the full course. There is so much juicy material, that I couldn't help myself jumping on implementing all lessons learned right away!

My family, and especially my 3 yo son, LOVE the amount of TIME that I am now saving through social media automation. We are spending our mornings having breakfast together, our evenings outside in the park or playgrounds, our weekends – exploring the wilderness and adventuring. ..So I have much to write about on my blog instead of spending hours and hours on clicking like/follow buttons.

All of this is possible to social media automation that I set up, implementing advice and tricks learned from the Blogging Blastoff course, and getting my questions answered quickly in the support channels.

Looking for more tips on how to run your travel, outdoor or adventure blog? Guidance on how to promote your blog on social media? Stay tuned and regularly check out my Travel Blogging section! I'm preparing my own course to help you out with the first steps!

In the meantime, check out our recent post on the Costs of Blogging: Travel Blogging For Beginners: Detailed Costs & Budget Breakdown!

Looking to start your own blog and need professional help from a blogger who’s been there? Join our newsletter, get weekly tips and insights, and regular promos on our online materials for beginner bloggers. Check out the rest of our Travel Blogger Resources section of course!

Cheerfully yours,

Alexandra, Alex, and Cosmos

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