Monday 5 February 2018

dlvr.it for hobby bloggers

I wanted to share my limited experience with dlvr.it to the rest of the hobby bloggers. We're all in this together now and although there's no secret to blog success this is another tool to attach to your belt to help you share your posts.

So what is dlvr.it?

According to their website it's the '#1 Automated Social Media Manager' and the most important aspect of that is the 'automated' bit, which I'll come to shortly. Firstly though some background - most of my current social media use is Facebook, obviously blogger, a YouTube channel of mixed videos [manily from my kendo days] and I do have Twitter and Instagram accounts.

Twitter is not something I ever really warmed to though, I get what it's for but I've always found the app really unintuitive to use. Instagram is also a lesser concern, originally I was going to use it to share the best snapshots I'd taken but as Games Workshop started to use it to harvest pictures of hobbyists models to go on their product pages it soon became important to share pictures on there if I had a hope of them being 'officially' recognised. I use it now to showcase my finished To Done pics.

Most importantly though is that just because I have a narrow field of social media doesn't mean those that follow [or would be potentially interested in what I do] are not using them. So how does one engage with a social media platform they can't get their head round? Automation! And that's where dlvr.it comes in. Dlvr.it will take your blog feed and automatically share it to various social media platfroms including:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pintrest
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • LinkedIn Company [?]
  • Tumblr
  • RSS Feed
  • Stocktwits [The Largest Social Network for Investors and Traders]
The ones I've highlighted in yellow are potentially of interest to us. Initially I was just using dlvr.it to automatically shunt my blog posts to my facebook group. I'd used another RSS feed tool but it needed approvals every couple of months [or it wouldn't work] and eventually the app folded anyway which led me to dlvr.it

For the purpose of Facebook though I think you do need access to a group you manage, which might not make it suitable if you haven't set one up or have direct admin over one. But as a simple way to get readers to see your blog I think Facebook has worked really well as a gateway to 40kaddict and for the most part I was fine with that. I'll occassionally post content direct to the group, bypassing the blog altogether, sometimes the content feels right for Facebook and not for the blog.

Then I had the epipany above that just because I don't use twitter doesn't mean other people don't and so I started looking into how I could automatically send my blog feed to twitter and while I was looking at a number of tools discovered that I was already using one and it was pretty straightforward to add my twitter account to it. The added bonus is that post labels are parsed as hashtags which wasquite handy for likes of #dreadtober. I'm now using twitter far more than I used to, specifically keeping up with other hobbyists and those from the Warhammer Community team who are quite active. I may end up far more confident with it but as a starting point dlvr.it has allowed me to participate with minimal effort.

Now although I have a Pintrest account it's not something I understand and I couldn't envisage how my feed would translate but feel free to experiment. Google+ seemed redundant as my blog is automatically shared on G+ and any specific G+ communities I want to share it to really need a more direct approach.

Lastly [as the RSS feed was pretty explanatory anyway] there was Tumblr which is a 'microblogging' site. I've no idea what this is for, who uses it or how popular it is but I now have a tumblr page because again dlvr.it just automates it. Whether it's successful or not I don't have to do anything to be a part of that platform. Regardless it increases the size of my social media footprint and I'm guessing will make search engines pick up more than just my blog.

So the bottom line is I don't know much more than the rest of you, but dlvr.it has allowed me to be part of platforms I didn't want to deal with directly, or at least until I actually understand them I'll have a foot in the door. So if you're like me then you might want to look into trying dlvr.it. or a similar social media tool, as it's minimal effort for some potential gains. Word of warning though, I'm no IT support, I did this back in September and it was reasonably straightforward with a bit of work but I don't recall any of the setup process, but if I can manage it so can you.

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