Revive Old Posts HomepageSource: Revive Old Posts Homepage

Many professional bloggers follow the same strategy when it comes to content marketing: promote more, create less. This strategy involves the use of social media to grow a following outside of your website and use that following to promote content new and old.

That’s where a plugin like Revive Old Posts comes into play. It puts content promotion on autopilot by sharing blog posts to social media as soon as they’re published. You can even create a never-ending queue that shares new and old content alike continuously.

What is Revive Old Posts?

Revive Old Posts is a WordPress plugin developed and maintained by Revive Social. It’s the flagship product of the company’s small yet growing collection of social media tools, the other being Revive Network.

The latter plugin helps you grow your social media presence by finding and sharing relevant content from authoritative publishers automatically. Revive Old Posts, on the other hand, is designed to pull in traffic from social media to old and new content alike. The two plugins are meant to complement one another.

Key Features

  • Auto Post to Social Media – At its core, this plugin is designed to publish posts (and pages) to various social media accounts automatically.
  • Promote Old Posts – Choose the minimum and maximum age (in days) of the posts you want shared to social media. You can even have the plugin reshare each post automatically once all available posts have been shared to your social media accounts.
  • Promote New Posts – Have the plugin share new posts to your accounts as soon as they’re published by WordPress.
  • Share to Multiple Social Media Networks – Twitter and Facebook are available in the free version. A premium license unlocks the ability to publish posts to LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest and Buffer. The Buffer integration is designed to enable publishing to Facebook Groups and Instagram.
  • Limit Posts – Limit the number of posts the plugin publishes to social media, and choose how much time the plugin waits between posts.
  • Exclude Posts – Exclude specific posts from social sharing manually. You can also exclude posts by category and tag. Custom taxonomies work as well. This can be done on a per-account basis with Revive Old Posts Pro.
  • Custom Post Types (PRO) – The premium version of the plugin is designed to work with custom post types as well, including WooCommerce products and recipes.
  • URL Shortener Integrations – Revive Old Posts inserts links back to your site in the posts it generates for you. To save on space, integrate it with Bitly, Firebase Dynamic Links (formerly Google URL Shortener), Ow.ly, is.gd, Rebrandly or WordPress’ built-in link shortener.
  • Predefined Text (PRO) – The Additional Text field in the premium version allows you to add predefined text at the beginning and/or end of every social media post.
  • Hashtags – Make a list of common hashtags you use to promote your content and have them readily available. You can also create hashtags out of categories, tags and custom fields.
  • Varied Social Media Posts (PRO) – Create one or more variations of the same social media post to avoid spamming your followers with the same message over and over again. This also operates as a workaround for duplicate content issues you may experience with Twitter and LinkedIn.
  • Media Posts (PRO) – Share images and videos from your library as social media posts. You can also choose to attach featured images to social media posts.
  • Google Analytics Integration – Revive Old Posts integrates with Google Analytics so you can see how much traffic your site receives from the social media posts the plugin generates for you. Custom UTM tags are supported as well in the premium version.

Installation & Setup

The premium version of Revive Old Posts acts as an add-on to the free version, so you’ll need to ensure Revive Old Posts Lite is installed and activated on your site.

Install Revive Old Posts

It works the same as any other premium plugin after that. Once you purchase a premium license, you can download the plugin’s ZIP folder and upload it to your WordPress site for installation.

You can connect your social media accounts to the plugin once everything is installed and activated. This mainly involves signing into your account through the plugin and authorizing the connection.

We did run into a brief issue when we connected the plugin to our Twitter account. The connection failed initially, and a message stating our WordPress configuration’s REST API functionality was not available and a security plugin or our host may be at fault appeared at the top of the plugin’s dashboard.

The issue disappeared when we refreshed, but it has occurred for others and persisted when it did. Fortunately, it seems to be a minor issue you can resolve quite easily once you find the cause.

Revive Old Posts Dashboard

Other than that, connecting your social media accounts or even Buffer to the plugin is a smooth process overall. Speaking of which, if you already have all of your social media accounts connected to Buffer, you can simply sign in and connect all of your accounts to Revive Old Posts in one fell swoop.

General Settings

Initial setup concludes with configuring the plugin’s general settings. This is where you can control the minimum and maximum age (in days) a post must have to be included in the sharing queue. You can also control which post types should be included.

Revive Old Posts Settings

You’ll also notice a setting called Share More Than Once that you can toggle on or off (it’s on by default). If all available posts have been shared to social media, this setting ensures the queue continues endlessly by returning each post to it automatically. Plus, if you use the Variations feature to create different social media posts for each WordPress post, you won’t need to worry about sharing the same messages over and over again.

There are also four settings you can configure here to control the way the plugin promotes new posts. Two are enabled by default to create social media posts automatically when posts are published or updated as well as when you click the Publish button.

You can also enable instant sharing in the WordPress editor on a per-post basis, which is why the Enable Instant Sharing by Default setting exists. Finally, you can enable instant sharing for scheduled blog posts.

Configuring Social Media Post Formats

Revive Old Posts makes configuring the social media posts it generates for you incredibly easy. It only requires adjusting a small handful of settings. You start by choosing which part(s) of a post is shared on social media. Your options include custom fields.

Revive Old Posts - Post Format

This is also where you set up and use the Additional Text feature, which inserts predetermined text at the beginning or end of each social media post. The choice is yours. This feature also supports “magic tags,” which are dynamic fields that output details liable to change from post to post, such as a post’s author name, product prices, etc.

You can also set up predefined hashtags for tags you use on a regular basis. You can generate these from taxonomies and custom fields. Lastly, you can opt to have the plugin share each post’s permalink or set up a URL shortener integration. The is.gd URL shortener doesn’t require an API key or access token.

Excluding Posts

You can exclude posts manually on the WordPress editor screen and can even exclude multiple posts in one fell swoop by excluding specific taxonomies or posts published before or after a certain number of days.

However, the plugin also includes a page you can use to find and exclude specific posts from a list with a simple click of a button. You can search for a post on this page to exclude it, or create a filtered search that pinpoints posts based on post type and/or taxonomy.

Creating Post Variations

The Variations feature, which allows you to create multiple, prewritten social media posts for a single WordPress post, is invaluable. The only drawback we found is that it’s not automatic. The plugin doesn’t simply rearrange the information in the post, such as sharing an excerpt from the post’s content where you normally only share its title.

Revive Old Posts - Meta Boxes

If you want to create a second social media post, you’ll need to create it manually within the individual post’s edit page. Nevertheless, it’s still very simple to do and even allows you to utilize the same magic tags available to you in the Additional Text field.

The Finished Product, Custom Schedules and More

Here’s an example of how a post generated by Revive Old Posts appears on Twitter:

Revive Old Posts - TweetSource: Twitter

You can gain a sense of how useful and even effective this plugin can be based on these two screenshots alone. It allows you to put one of the most essential aspects of your editorial schedule on autopilot. It can also help you drive new traffic to posts you’ve published in the past.

Revive Old Posts - Custom Schedule

Once you have everything set up, you can control your social media calendar even further by setting up custom schedules for each platform. This can be done on a recurring (based on a specified number of hours) or fixed basis. The latter option allows you to choose which days of the week social media posts should be scheduled on as well as which time of day they should be scheduled for.

That’ll lead you to two essential tabs within the Revive Old Posts dashboard in WordPress: Sharing Queue and Sharing Logs.

Revive Old Posts - Start Sharing

The Sharing Queue allows you to view all of the posts the plugin has scheduled for you. You can also skip and edit individual posts and block specific posts from being published to social media altogether.

The Sharing Logs feature a simple list of the social media posts the plugin has published for you.

Where is Revive Old Posts Headed?

Revive Old Posts adds an item to the admin menu called “Plugin Roadmap.” It leads to a Trello board when clicked. The board allows you to see which features Revive Social is working on adding to the plugin and which features have been planned. You can also vote on features and leave suggestions.

Revive Old Posts - Plugin RoadmapSource: Trello

Overall, the board is evidence of how dedicated Revive Social is to this plugin as well as how much they value customer feedback and input. The biggest update coming to Revive Old Posts, at the time this post was originally written, is an updated cron system. This system will clear up issues the plugin has with WordPress’ cron system, which prevents social media posts from publishing every now and again.

A few additional features you have to look forward to (and may even have now depending on when you’re reading this) include previews for social media posts, a social media calendar that allows you to reschedule posts manually, social sharing for RSS feeds and support for Google My Business.

All in all, there’s a lot to look forward to no matter when you become a user of this plugin.

Pricing for Revive Old Posts

The free version of Revive Old Posts primarily allows you to generate social media posts for one Twitter account and one Facebook page. A few additional posts are available as well, including the ability to exclude posts, integrations with URL shorteners and automatic hashtags.

Pricing for the premium version starts at $75/year for a single site license. You gain access to all of the features mentioned in this article, including the ability to post to multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. Premium ticket support is included as well.

Custom scheduling and queue management are available in the Business and Marketer plans, which cost $178.99/year and $299/year respectively. The Business plan provides three site licenses while the Marketer plan provides an unlimited number of licenses.

A 30-day, money-back guarantee is available on all plans.

Final Thoughts

Revive Old Posts is easy to use and an invaluable tool if you have a WordPress blog. Not only does it share your latest content to social media automatically, it breathes new life into old content by sharing it as well.

Can it replace tools like Buffer and MeetEdgar? That depends. If you only use your current social media management tool to promote content, you’re likely overpaying for an overly complicated solution.

Revive Old Posts is designed for WordPress and costs half the price or less than many other solutions. However, it’s not capable of scheduling social media posts in the same way the other tools are. You may want to use it as a companion tool in this case.

Overall, Revive Old Posts is a fantastic product and the driving force behind social media management here at MH Themes.

Check Out Revive Old Posts

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