Last updated: October 24, 2023
If there is one thing I have done in the last 8 months which has saved me hours upon hours of time every month, it is signing up to SocialOomph. This quick and easy online tool has helped me to manage Twitter accounts for all of my blogs without me going crazy. It is also helping me increase my blog traffic, which is one of my blogging goals for 2018. I have four blogs at the moment and publish several blog posts per week across all of them. They each, of course, have a Twitter account which needs maintaining. I need to add all new blog posts to Twitter, and have tweets promoting them on a continuous basis. This ensures maximum visibility. I have used several tools to manage Twitter in the past, but by far the easiest and most customisable one I have used is SocialOomph.
What Is SocialOomph?
SocialOomph is an online tool which, like Hootsuite or Buffer for example, allows you to manage your social media accounts from one online location. There are various levels of subscription, ranging from completely free up to a Professional account. SocialOomph covers Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn and more. It has many different customisable features.
What Is Included In A Free Subscription?
A free SocialOomph subscription is a great way to get started with the site, and it has some brilliant features. There are some restrictions, of course, with it being a free account (more on those below). But here are the main features of a free account:
As you can see, you can add up to five Twitter accounts to your SocialOomph account for free. You can manage all of these accounts from one place. You can schedule tweets ahead of time, and use other features to track mentions, retweets and keywords. The limitations to a free account are that you can only use it for Twitter, and not Facebook or any other social site. You can also only schedule 12 tweets to appear on Twitter from all of your Twitter accounts per 60 minutes. This isn’t bad at all, but if you have several accounts you may want to upgrade your account so you can send out more tweets within that hour period. With a free subscription you cannot set up recurring updates, which is what I find so useful about the next level upgrade: a Twitter Unlimited subscription.
What Is Included In A Twitter Unlimited Subscription?
Twitter Unlimited is the SocialOomph account type that I currently use, having upgraded from a free subscription in June 2017. Currently, this subscription costs me £12.63 per month. This is excellent value considering what I get out of this service. The differences between the free account and Twitter Unlimited are:
If you manage more than five Twitter accounts, you will need this subscription in order to use them all on SocialOomph. The main benefits to me of this particular subscription type are that I can send out more than 12 tweets per hour, I can set recurring tweets, time-limited tweets, and multiple variations of the same tweet. You can see how I use this to its full benefit in detail below.
What Is Included In A Professional Subscription?
A Professional subscription is the highest level SocialOomph subscription, and the most expensive. You get all the features of a Twitter Unlimited subscription, and much more. With this you can start to use SocialOomph to manage Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plurk and RSS feeds. You can do a lot more with Twitter (such as manage Twitter lists and find people to follow). A Professional subscription also allows you to schedule and publish blog posts, tweet via email, and allow staff members to manage your social media accounts. The uses are extensive, and you can see all of them on the SocialOomph homepage. It currently costs around £28 per month (all prices are in US dollars).
How I Use The SocialOomph Twitter Unlimited Service
As I mentioned, this is the subscription level I have had since June 2017. It has proved to be brilliant value for money for me. I am able to manage the Twitter accounts for all of my blogs in a very time efficient way. The features of being able to set up recurring updates, vary the text of each update, and set time-limited tweets has been extremely beneficial. Not to mention, increased frequency of my tweets has increased traffic to my blog.
When I publish a blog post, I usually want to be able to tweet about it from that blog’s Twitter account on a recurring basis. Because I have the option to set recurring updates, it takes me a couple of minutes at the most to set this up in SocialOomph. To start off with this, you will need to have your Twitter account connected to SocialOomph. You do this under ‘Networks’ in the top menu. Allow SocialOomph access to your Twitter account. All of mine are currently connected.
Create A Queue
The next step is to set up a queue (or queue reservoir). A queue reservoir is basically a pool of your tweets that SocialOomph sends out according to the settings you define here.
Under ‘Posting’, select ‘Queue Reservoirs’. From the tabs, select ‘Create New Queue’. The settings you can define here include how often you want to tweet, and whether or not you want to recycle tweets and send them out more than once. You can also set windows of time in which you tweet, if you wish.
Name your queue reservoir. I just use the initials of my blog, e.g. AHAO for At Home & Online. You can now choose to publish updates (tweets) at random intervals, or at specific regular interviews. For example, twice a day, once every two hours, or three times a week. If you don’t have many blog posts yet, you might want to send tweets out at longer intervals. If you have hundreds or thousands of posts, you may want to send them out in quicker succession. You can pick different intervals from minutes, days, hours and weeks. Ensure you select the Twitter account that you want to use this queue for.
Choose if you want to recycle updates. I do this. It means that your scheduled tweet is sent out, and then automatically drops back in to the end of the queue. This looping system saves me hours each month!
You can also decide which days of the week you want to tweet, which hours of the day and, if you want, which months of the year. Remember that these settings affect all of the tweets that you put into this queue.
Set Up Variations Of Your Tweets
You now want to fill up your queue reservoir with tweets. If you have selected to recycle tweets, the reservoir will never be empty. Your Twitter account will be continuously tweeting from a bottomless pool of tweets. You just need to feed the tweets into the queue. Under ‘Posting’, select ‘Create New Update’. I usually select ‘New Image & Text’ from the tabs but you can set up a tweet without an image as well using ‘New Text Update’.
If adding a photo, select it here and upload it to this update. Next you put in the text of your tweet. This is where you can be creative! SocialOomph has the brilliant feature that allows you to set up variations of a tweet. You can type out several different sentences here, and SocialOomph will randomly select one of them to send out. When your tweet is recycled, it will randomly select again. You will very rarely be sending out the same tweet twice in a row.
To do this, in the Text box you start by using the { bracket. Write out a tweet, add the vertical bar sign which looks like this | and then write out a different version of the tweet. You can do this as many times as you want, making sure to close off the text block with a } at the end. You can see my example of how to do this here:
If you want to include a link in your tweet, paste it in after the last bracket and click ‘Shorten Links’. You can finish off the tweet by adding any hashtags or other text that you want to (ETA: since this post went live, Socialoomph now limit the number of hashtags you can add to your tweets to two).
To add it to the queue reservoir you just set up, tick the box shown above. Make sure the correct queue reservoir is selected if you have more than one. You can also choose to have this update go in to more than one queue reservoir. If you’ve set up recycled tweets, you can select to have this one put back in at the end of the queue. If you only want to do this a few times before it’s deleted, state how many times. Leave blank to have this recycled in your queue reservoir indefinitely.
The above takes no more than a couple of minutes to set up. Every time I publish a blog post, I add it to my queue reservoir for that blog. It’s then constantly tweeted out. To avoid the same tweet going out over and over, I make sure to include several variations of the text as shown above.
You can also set up recurring tweets for blog posts or news which is time specific. For example, a giveaway. When I run a giveaway I don’t want to publicise it after the closing date, so I set up the tweets in a different way:
Instead of adding it to my queue reservoir, I set it to be published at a specific frequency for a set number of recurrences. It’s deleted after it is published for that specific amount of recurrences.
Editing Your Updates
You can easily edit or delete your existing updates. Simply go to ‘Posting” and then ‘Queue Reservoirs’. From here you can manage the updates in each reservoir by selecting that option. You’ll see a list of all your updates, and can change the photos attached to them. You can also move them up or down in the queue, or schedule them for deletion. The update at the top is the one which is due to go out next. Here you can see SocialOomph has randomly selected one of the text options I typed in for that tweet. Once it goes out, the update will fall to the bottom of the queue and work its way up. Again, SocialOomph will randomly select one of the text options to publish.
My Verdict
I really don’t know where I would be without SocialOomph. It saves me so much time every day. I take a couple of minutes to set up a recurring tweet complete with link to the newest blog post and any hashtags I want. I just set that up, and off it goes on a non-stop cycle. It saves time spent scheduling multiple tweets one after the other. With the variations you can set up in tweet text, I can set up different-looking tweets in one go. For less than £13 a month this is one of my must-haves as a blogger who runs multiple blogs and Twitter accounts.
Although the site itself is not pretty looking or fancy in any way, once you get used to navigating around it, it is really easy to use. I wonder what I did without it. There are lots of other features to this subscription which I haven’t yet needed to use. They will no doubt be useful in the future.
I’ve not yet needed to upgrade to the Professional account. I still manage my Facebook accounts ‘manually’ (as and when I want to rather than scheduling posts). I am also using a free trial of Boardbooster to manage Pinterest so I don’t need to use anything else for it yet. There is the option to trial the SocialOomph Professional account for free, so I may give that a go when I need to get more into scheduling on LinkedIn and other accounts.
Who Would Like SocialOomph
The free version of SocialOomph is perfect for people who like to set up tweets in advance but are not bothered about looping them. It’s great if you have multiple Twitter accounts and want to spend a little bit of time once a week or so scheduling tweets in advance.
Find out how to use Twitter to find blogging opportunities.
The Twitter Unlimited subscription is perfect for someone like me. I don’t enjoy scheduling tweets and want it done as quickly as possible. If you have multiple blogs with related Twitter accounts, you’ll find that this saves you an inordinate amount of time. The various customisation options for individual Twitter accounts is a fantastic feature.
The Professional account would be a great tool for someone who owns a business with staff members, and who utilises different social media accounts for their business. Being able to grant staff access to the SocialOomph account so they can schedule updates is a great advantage, and for the price is well worth it.
Why not pin this post for later?
I would love to know if you’ve used SocialOomph or if you have another way of managing your Twitter account or accounts.
Let me know if you have any questions about SocialOomph! I will do my best to answer them for you.
I’ve been thinking of moving from hootsuite for a while and this has definitely convinced me to give this a try! Thanks for sharing.
You’re welcome Kaya – glad it helped you!
Thanks so much for this post! I recently got SocialOomph but didn’t know that it can randomly select text! SO glad I came across your post (via Twitter, btw. :D) I also subbed to your blog. Keep up the good work!
On a side note, I’m a bit confused when it comes to the “Evenly distribute updates” option: does this affect tweets in queue reservoires as well ?
Hi Eileen, it’s a great feature isn’t it? It saves so much time. So I had a look for the ‘evenly distribute updates’ option, but couldn’t see it. Is that when you write an update, or when you create a queue reservoir?