📹 How To Bulk Import Posts From Blogs & RSS

Bulk importing is a feature of the Business and Agency plans, as well as custom plans with the Intermediate Importer add-on.

Have a blog? Favorite site? YouTube channel? Import all of your posts at once using Bulk Import for RSS 🎉 To learn more about what an RSS feed is, check out this helpful article.

Video Walkthrough

How To Find The RSS Feed And Start Importing

RSS feeds allow SmarterQueue to create social posts from your favorite blogs without you having to find each post individually.

To start importing from your favorite blog, follow these quick steps:

1. Firstly, go to 'Find Content':

2. Then select 'Share posts from others' blogs', if you want to share relevant content from other sources, or 'Share your blog posts', if you're looking to import content from your own blog.

3. In the search box, type the web address for the blog whose posts you’re looking to import and press 'Enter' - you don’t need to worry about finding RSS feeds, SmarterQueue does that automatically!

SmarterQueue will then fetch the most recent posts from the provided source.

4. To import these posts in bulk, select the 'Bulk' option for 'Import Mode'.

This will show all posts in a list format.

How To Use The Bulk Editor Box

4. The 'Bulk Editor Box' will make bulk changes to all of the posts that you import. You may select all/none or just the ones you want.

By default, all of the blog posts shown are selected to be imported.

Any change you make in the grey bulk editor box at the top will change each of the posts below. The bulk changes you can make are:

Toggle Evergreen on and off
Choose whether to add images, remove images, or use an image link
Select a Category
Select Social Profiles to post to

You’re also able to go through the list and make the same changes to each post individually.

5. If you decide that you don't want to import all of the fetched posts, you can uncheck the 'Select all/none' box and then move through the list to select strictly the posts you want to be sent to your Queue.

The posts that you unselect will be greyed out, to help you keep track of what content you'll be sending to your Queue once done.

When selecting posts one by one, keep in mind to also toggle Evergreen on or off, select Categories, Social Profiles you're sending to, etc. for each one.

How To Set Your Import Link Options

When importing in bulk, you can recheck your Link Options and make any changes needed for the specific import.

1. At the bottom of the page, choose 'Import Options' to edit the link tracking parameters for these posts.

In the 'Import Options' popup, you’ll see that SmarterQueue adds Google Analytics UTM codes and Bitly click tracking depending on your default settings.

2. Here, you can choose to keep these settings or change them as necessary. You can also choose whether to add your imported posts to the top or bottom of your Queue.

3. Once done, click ' Add [#] Selected Post to Top of Queue'.

In the background, SmarterQueue will import the images and preview text for each blog post.

Once these are imported, you’ll see them in your Queue with Timeslots assigned, and link previews to show how these will look on each social network.

How To Work Around Import Limitations

Importing from RSS feeds is subject to limitations - this is because most feeds usually only contain the most recent 10 or 20 blog posts.

As such, SmarterQueue will only be able to import as many potential posts as the RSS feed delivers. That said, there are a couple of situations to keep in mind:

if you’re importing from a Wordpress-powered blog, you’re in luck - we are able to go through multiple pages of RSS posts, and fetch up to 200 posts from your blog.
if the blog is using Feedburner to host its RSS feeds, we can only see the most recent page of blog posts and the mentioned limitation applies.

When you are running your own Wordpress blog, you can edit the Settings to show more posts in the RSS feed – we recommend setting this value to around 20 posts.

If you would like to import more blog posts, that aren’t shown in the RSS feed, here are a couple of ways to speed up the process:

Use the Chrome Extension or Browser Bookmarklet - visit each blog post that you would like to share, and click the bookmarklet to create a new post from the blog. This method gives you the most control over images/text/links, but is most time-consuming.
If you can export an archive of all links for your blog posts, you can save them into a CSV file. You can then import the CSV file and bulk-create posts for all of your blog articles in a couple of clicks.
Find an archive/index page of your blog posts, and right-click on a blog link. Paste the link into a new row of a spreadsheet, and repeat for all links on your site. Save the spreadsheet as a CSV file, and then import it into SmarterQueue.

Common Questions

Why are some tweets too long to import?

When you’re importing existing posts from Twitter into one of your Twitter accounts, you may find that they can’t be imported because they’re over the 280-character limit.

If you’re importing a tweet from someone else’s account, we add “via @username” into the tweet so the original author can be credited.

You can choose not to add these credits by changing the “Add Text Attribution To Imported Tweets” setting in the 'Settings' page.

What happens if I try to bulk import a post that is too long for Twitter or LinkedIn?

When bulk importing, you will always have the chance to edit the post text before adding it to your Queue.

If you are importing to a Twitter account, we will check the post length (including any links and images), and warn you if the post exceeds Twitter’s 280-character limit or LinkedIn’s 1300 character limit.

You can then edit the text so that it doesn’t exceed the character limit.

How do I import more than 200 posts at once?

If you're importing in bulk and are enjoying the vast returns from a Wordpress-powered blog, you might notice that SmarterQueue brings up to 200 posts at once.

If you want to import more than 200 posts you will need to import the initial 200 results first, and then:

Uncheck all of the results
Click 'Load more' at the bottom - this will automatically select the next 200 new posts (rows 201-400)

You can then bulk import just those new posts, and repeat the process. This will let you bulk-import 200 posts at a time, and work through as many pages of results as you need.

How can I find and import from a YouTube channel's RSS feed?

We've written a detailed, handy guide for how to find and import from YouTube RSS feeds here!