When curating content, posting to social media takes 10 minutes on average. A lot of this time is spent on looking for hashtags, tagging profiles, selecting images, and Scheduling the post. We think that it should take 10 seconds!

In another push towards fully automating content curation with AI, we launched an improved workflow that significantly speeds up posting to social media. Inboundli already had one of the fastest workflows for publishing social posts, and it just got a lot faster.

From now, when you click the Share button on a piece of content in inboundli, the app opens the quick post pop-up which does all the post optimization for you. It will automatically select social channels, tags, hashtags, images and a time to post, removing the need to do it manually.

Saving More Time (Without Compromising Flexibility)

This change comes as our customizable share pop-up grew increasingly large and feature-laden. We know that many of you love the flexibility it offers, but the pop-up’s complexity meant that, on average, from the moment you found a post it took 90 seconds to schedule it.

We thought that we can do better than this without compromising the flexibility of our original share pop-up. This is why we designed the quick post pop-up to allow scheduling a post in 10 seconds, while keeping the original share pop-up in case you want to manually adjust your post.

How “Quick Post” Does Everything For You

Let’s go into detail over what the new pop-up does.

Channels (1)

We made inboundli smarter about how it selects social channels. Twitter is selected for every post while Facebook and LinkedIn are selected once per day. inboundli will then select an optimal time slot for scheduling Facebook and LinkedIn posts.

If you want to share more than once a day to Facebook and LinkedIn, you can go to Scheduling > Scheduling template and adjust the posting frequency.

Text (2)

inboundli will take care of optimizing the post for you. The platform quotes the article title, adds a link to the original content, tags the publisher and attaches the most searched hashtags.

Only the Twitter text is shown in order to save room but inboundli also optimizes the text for Facebook and LinkedIn behind the scenes. The only difference is that inboundli will omit tagging to Facebook and LinkedIn.

Note: If you choose to edit the post, hashtags will be removed.

Time (3)

inboundli will select the next available time-slot using your scheduling template. This behavior is similar to the one in the original share pop-up.

Image (4)

inboundli will automatically use the main image from the article you’re curating. This is similar to the behavior in the original share pop-up.

Editing the Post Manually

If you’re happy with the default selections made by inboundli, all you have to do now is click the Schedule button.

On the other hand, if there’s something you don’t like, you can click the Edit button which will bring up the original share pop-up. Now you can edit everything just like you used to.

Some Numbers

Before rolling out the quick post pop-up to everyone, we ran extensive tests with a quarter of our clients. On average, only one in 5 posts needed manual editing, so 4 posts were scheduled in 10 seconds each and one post had to be scheduled using the original share pop-up (90 seconds). This adds up to 130 seconds (2m 10s) for 5 posts as opposed to 450 seconds (7m 30s) doing it the old way.

This is a considerable improvement over the previous workflow, but it’s even more impressive when compared to the industry average of 10 minutes per post. In this context, it would take 50 minutes to schedule 5 posts vs our 2 minutes and 10 seconds. Our workflow is 23 times faster (or saving 96% of time).

Part of a Larger Strategy

As mentioned above, our goal with this improvement is to get one step closer to full social publishing automation. And in the upcoming weeks we will start rolling out just that – fully automated content selection, optimization and posting!