by Matt Zimmerman
The social media scheduler feature in ZimmWriter is groundbreaking, to say the least. Let’s clear up some initial confusion, though. It doesn’t post directly to social media platforms. Instead, it creates a schedule that you can feed into a third-party social media program (e.g., Publer) which will follow your schedule and make your social media posts at the appropriate time.
Hey, was that a big yawn?
You might be thinking, what’s so novel about a social media schedule?
Well let me ask you, how would you automatically create a social media schedule that takes into account the following factors:
Woah.
Before ZimmWriter, creating a social media schedule that considered the above factors was a tedious, manual process. Now we’re able to create it automatically!
Let’s walk through the various settings inside of ZimmWriter.
Note: Before we go any further, I want to mention that when dealing with “scheduled” posts (i.e., ones that WordPress will auto publish in the future) then only “Post Name” permalink structure works (e.g., https://www.yoursite.com/sample-post/). So if you’re using a different structure, then either only use the social media scheduler with published posts, or join the crowd and use the post name structure.
Note 2: When using subheading images, the social media scheduler is intended to be fed blog posts with one image per subheading (which is a typical ZimmWriter format). So if you manually added multiple images per subheading, used a page builder, or did other funky stuff, then it probably won’t work well.
The interface is complicatedly powerful.
The first think you’ll want to do is select your WordPress website and then a user with administrator privileges.
The next step is to tell ZimmWriter which posts you want added to the schedule.
You should start by optionally filtering by your categories you want included or excluded.
Let’s say you have a category “Fall Home Decor” and you only want to build social media posts using posts from that category. In that case, enter the ID for that category.
How can you find category IDs?
Simple.
Install the 100% free plugin called “Reveal IDs” and then visit your category menu in WordPress.
You’ll then see an ID column next to each category.
But you can also leave the “comma separated list of category IDs to include” empty if you want ZimmWriter to make social media posts using WordPress blog posts from all your categories (except ones you specifically exclude).
The next box allows you to exclude certain categories.
As an example, when scheduling social posts for my designeraffair.com site, I excluded my “Product Reviews” category 40. I didn’t want this included because it has non-2:3 images from Amazon which wouldn’t work well as Pinterest posts.
The next thing to choose is the date range of WordPress posts you want ZimmWriter to use for social media posts.
The start range is WordPress posts published after a certain date.
The stop range is WordPress posts published before a certain date.
ZimmWriter’s super-duper powerful feature is its ability to consider scheduled posts. Let’s say you’ve got a hundred posts scheduled for 2025. If you choose 2026 as your stop date, ZimmWriter will include all the unpublished scheduled posts for 2025 when creating your social schedule. It’ll ensure that when it creates a social media post, the publication date is set after the date the blog post publishes on your WordPress site!
Choose when you’d like your social media schedule to start. Remember, ZimmWriter will build the schedule for up to two years from your chosen start date.
You’ll need to decide how many days should pass before repeating a URL to a specific blog post. Keep in mind that ZimmWriter will only repeat a URL when you’ve chosen to use subheading images (we’ll discuss this below). Otherwise, it’ll use each URL just once.
You’ll also need to determine how many social media posts you want ZimmWriter to schedule per day.
These are two incredibly powerful features.
The first lets you choose whether ZimmWriter should use subheading images from your blog posts as social media posts. Imagine you’ve got a blog post with a featured image and 15 subheading images. When you select this option, that single blog post transforms into 16 social media posts!
The second option allows the AI to recommend a date range. In many niches, it’s better to make certain social media posts during specific times of the year. It wouldn’t be productive to post about Easter during Christmas, or about grilling on a BBQ during winter.
When you choose this option, the AI will do its best to determine the ideal time of year to schedule your social media post.
No other social media scheduler in the world offers this feature!
The next three 100% optional options allow you to specify a custom prompt to be used when writing the social media title and description. ZimmWriter uses the same template as it uses for the TEXT and SERP discombobulators:
[DATA TO PROCESS]:
a line of text up to 5,000 characters long
[INSTRUCTIONS]:
your custom prompt, which should probably refer to DATA in all caps, or DATA TO PROCESS in all caps.
[RESULT]:
That prompt is exactly what I feed into the AI to create your social media title or the description.
The stuff in the [DATA TO PROCESS] becomes the WordPress post title, but in the event of a subheading image, it becomes the subheading title along with the subheading textual content.
The stuff in the [INSTRUCTIONS] is your custom prompt.
Here’s a few things to keep in mind:
Fancy some non-English output? Go for it!
Finally, give the job a name, select your AI model you want ZimmWriter to use when writing the social posts, and click the big juicy button that says Create Social Schedule.
Now ZimmWriter will go to work in two stages:
The first stage is fetching all of your data from your WordPress website and turning it into a comma separated file titled: yourjobname.csv
The second stage is when it takes that comma separated file and then turns it into a schedule and uses the AI to write each social media post.
How long does all of this take? It can take a long time (hours) if you’re scheduling a LOT of social media posts.
Let’s look at the first stage output, which is yourjobname.csv
The first stage file has a bunch of data pulled from your WordPress website about each post.
It might also have a date range in the “month” column which designates the best time to make a social media post about that particular blog post.
When that first stage is done, you’ll get a pop-up that says something to the effect of: hey, we’ve created your file, now it’s time to create your schedule, do you want to proceed?
ZimmWriter will then get to work creating your schedule, which will be called: yourjobname_complete.csv
It could take quite awhile to finish since ZimmWriter will contact the AI multiple times to write your social media title along with social media text for each social media post.
The end result will look like this:
I’m sure you’re smart enough to figure out what those columns mean.
Now what can you do with this file?
You can load up a program like Publer (affiliate) and use their bulk schedule feature to import a CSV schedule. You’ll need to copy the right columns from the yourjobname_complete.csv file into Publer’s required format, but that’s all you need to do.
Now you have a perfectly laid out social schedule for the next two years!
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