Missinglettr Review

This is my review of Missinglettr, a service I love and swear by. If you are short on time, the TL;DR is that it’s a great service worth using to promote your blog on social media.

Contrary to popular belief, social media has not replaced blogging. Social media is huge but blogging is still an excellent tool to create an audience, advance your career, and content marketing to sell products (to name just a few).

The problem with posting your blog posts on social media once

As I cover in my book, social media is complementary, not a replacement for blogging. You should promote the long content you produce on your blog on your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The trouble is that you’ll typically only do it once per post. And guess what? These social media platforms will only show your status update including your blog post to a small percentage of your followers/friends. So let’s say that you are fairly popular and have 4,000 followers on Twitter. When you post about your shiny new article, Twitter might show it to, say, 20 people.

If they really engage with it by liking and retweeting it, then the post will have a wider reach on Twitter, otherwise, only a small fraction of your followers (and an infinitesimal percentage of the rest of Twitter) will ever see it.

Some content might have a short lifespan. For instance, a sale that will end at midnight or in a few days. The overwhelming majority of your content, however, will be evergreen or have at least a year’s worth of life in it.

So it’s a shame that it’s only shown to a handful of social media followers.

Repeatedly sharing on social media is tedious

The obvious solution is to promote the same blog post on social media multiple times. Sure, you’d want to space it out a little and not post the same article every single day, but it’s a great way to expose your blog content to more of your followers.

This approach maximizes the number of people that will come to your blog from social media, without aggravating anyone. After all, social media algorithms will not show your posts to the exact subset of followers each time and you are not promoting the same post every day.

Furthermore, if you don’t post too much on social media in general, this will help your social media properties look a little more active, making them more appealing to prospective new followers.

The problem lies with doing this in practice. If you try to do it manually, you’ll burn out quite quickly. Let’s say that you have 10 articles that you want to promote regularly and that you want to post each article 10 times. You are looking at writing a different description for each, adding the right link, perhaps a different image (if your post as multiple)… 100 times.

Let’s say that you publish 10 articles in 2 months. You are now tasked with handling another 100 social media posts while in the middle of posting the existing 100. It quickly becomes untenable.

Missinglettr comes to the rescue

Missinglettr has been a godsend for me. I try a lot of social media tools every year. The majority I find somewhat useful and then quickly forget about. They are useful to an extent, but I don’t really extract enough value out of them to justify investing time let alone money.

This is not the case for Missinglettr. It’s the most useful social media service I use and I’m so glad to have come across it.

What Missinglettr does is take your feed and creates repeated, spaced out social media campaigns from your posts. You have full control in determining what these posts will look like and say, as well as how frequently they’ll be posted.

I use it for both my Programming blog and my Plant-Based diet blog and it has brought me thousands of extra visitors to them.

How Missinglettr works

For each site I added to Missinglettr, I connected their respective social media properties. For example, I connected Programming Zen to my Twitter and my LinkedIn accounts, while I connected Plant-Based.org to its Twitter account and Facebook page.

Every time I publish a new post on either of these two sites, a draft campaign will be generated on my behalf on Missinglettr and I’ll receive an email to approve, make changes, or reject it.

First, a series of hashtags will be autogenerated from the content. I usually end up keeping some, deleting others, and adding a few, sticking to 5 hashtags or so in total. These hashtags will appear beneath each social media post for this particular post’s campaign.

Next, you’ll get to customize how each post will appear on social media. The description, image, or image made out of a quote extracted from your post are all customizable by you, but they are also automatically generated to save you time.

So if you don’t like the quote image on Day 14, you can flip through other quotes extracted from your post, or enter your own. Or you can switch to an image instead.

The embedded Tweet below shows an example of a quote image:

By default, Missinglettr gives you a good mix of quote images and images extracted from your post, but again, this can all be customized to your liking.

The tweet below shows one instance in which Missinglettr picked up a photo from the post:

Usually, I only need to do minor changes. You can change the length and frequency of the campaign, but in my case, I set my social media posts to go live on Day 0, 3, 7, 14, 30, 90, 180, 270, and 365 of the post being published. As a result, I get nine pre-populated social media posts that I can either approve or customize and then approve.

This is extra traffic on autopilot, while still ensuring that the content on social media is presented in the way I approve of!

Statistics are provided for each campaign while they are in progress and once they are completed so that you can see how effective they have been in reach your existing social media followers and new audiences.

At $7 a month (if paying annually, otherwise $9) this is a no brainer and I would highly recommend it to any serious blogger.