This guide will walk you through how to setup and use content queues for scheduling your posts to your social media profiles.
Firstly we'll explain how content queues work
Content queues are a way to organise your content and post them to selected social profiles based on a schedule that you set.
There are two parts to a content queue. The first is the queue, this is what you will add your posts to when you create them. Secondly, there are the schedules that you attach to the queue, these schedules determine when the post will be published to the social profile.
So for example, you could have a content queue called "Interesting links", which has a schedule that posts to your twitter profile every monday, wednesday and friday at 3pm. You can have multiple schedules for a queue, but for the purpose of this example, we'll stick to a single schedule.
In this example, when you create a post and add it to queue, it'll be scheduled to be posted at the next available time. In this case, if we created the post on a Sunday, the next time would be the coming Monday.
As more posts are added to the queue, they'll be automatically queued to be posted, so the first post will go on Monday, the second on Wednesday, and so on.
What makes content queues powerful is their ability to automatically republish (or resurface!) your content. You can also use rules to determine for how long your content is republished before being removed from the queue automatically.
If you write a lot of evergreen content, do content marketing, or have followers in different timezones, this is quite a powerful feature designed to get your content in front of more of your followers.
First, you'll need to be logged into Resurface, then navigate to the "Content queues" page. A link to this will be on your navigation menu at the top.
The first time you go to this page, you'll see a prompt to create your first Content Queue:
Click on the "Create queue" button. Now you'll need to give this queue a name. We recommend naming the queue based on the type of content you'll be posting to it.
For this example we're going to post interesting links to this queue, so let's give it the name "Interesting links". You can also set a colour for this queue, this is to help visually indentify it on the publishing calendar. We're going to use a deep fuchsia colour for this queue:
Great, we've named and set a colour for the queue. Now the more interesting part is to setup a schedule for this queue, along with the social profiles we want this queue to publish to. Click on the "Create schedule" button to add your first schedule:
Resurface makes scheduling really flexible. Here are the options when setting up a schedule:
In our example we're going to post to our Twitter profile on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10AM. We're using the "Weekly" repeat option. At the bottom of the form, you'll see a summary in words of when exactly the post will be published.
Now click on the add schedule button to attach this schedule to the queue you've created:
As you can see the schedule you've created is listed in the queue, along with a text summary of when it'll be published to the social profile.
You also get a handy preview of the publishing calendar for this queue based on the schedules added to this queue on the right:
At this point, you can add another schedule to this queue. This is useful if you want to publish content to different social profiles at slightly different times, or you want to publish more often. In our example, we're just going to stick with one schedule for this Content Queue.
To finish up, click on the "Create content queue" button to save changes and create your first Content Queue!
Let's dive into how you can set up posts to be automatically republished.
First choose the social profiles you want to publish your post to, and add the message that you want to post, in this example we're going to post to Twitter:
Now click on the "Add to queue" button, which will show you the available queues for your post. We're going to have this post automatically be republished, but we're setting a limit of 3 times. To do this, click on the requeue slider, and update the rules for the post as shown below:
Click the "Add" button, and now when we publish this post, it'll be automatically queued into the "Interesting articles" queue and it'll be posted at the next available time slot for this queue.
To make things clear, you'll be given a text description of how this post will be handled by Resurface as shown above.
Finally click on the "Finish & create post" button to finish creating your post.
You'll be able to see when this post will be published to your social profiles by looking at your publishing calendar
In this example, you can see that the post will be published three times over the course of the week. The publishing calendar shows the date, time, what content queue and the social profile that the post will be published to.