Share the content you publish

Most small businesses publish a good blog post and then tell nobody. The post goes live, sits on page three of Google for a few months, and the only people who read it found it by accident. A short social post on the day it goes live won’t change its rankings directly, but it gets the post in front of customers, earns the odd share and link, and gives the business something to say on channels that otherwise go quiet.

RankThat includes a social media scheduler for exactly that job. It sits beside the content calendar, drafts posts from your articles and your site’s topics, and publishes to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Reddit on the schedule you approve. This article explains how it works, what it is good for, and where a dedicated social tool would serve you better.

In short: use it to keep social channels active with posts that point to your content, without a second tool and a second login. It isn’t built for community management, paid social or analytics.

Connecting your accounts

Open a project and go to Social › Social Calendar, then open Settings. Connect each network by signing in:

Connections use each network’s own sign-in, and the access tokens are stored encrypted. If a token expires, RankThat refreshes it once before marking a post as failed.

Drafting a batch of posts

You can write posts one by one, but the useful part is batch drafting. Click Generate Week for the coming week, or pick a start and end date to fill a longer period. Settings control the mix:

• Posts per week (seven by default).
• Content mix. By default about 70% of posts are repurposed from your published articles and the rest are original posts drawn from your site’s topics. If there aren’t enough articles yet, more originals fill the gap.
• Posting times. 9:00, 12:00 and 15:00 unless you set your own.
• Tone preferences, on top of the project’s brand voice, so posts sound like the business.
• Auto-generate. Manual, daily, weekly or every two weeks.
• Auto-approve. Off by default. Leave it off unless you trust the drafts completely.

Each post respects the network’s length limit: 3,000 characters on LinkedIn, 2,200 on Instagram, 5,000 on Facebook, 10,000 on Reddit and 280 on X.

You can also create posts from a single article: in the article editor, the Social Posts button drafts posts for that article.

Review, approve, schedule

Every post moves through the same steps, and RankThat enforces the order so nothing is published by accident.

1. Draft. Edit the text, hashtags and the date and time.
2. Approved. You have read it and it is good to go. Only drafts can be approved.
3. Scheduled. It has a time slot. Only approved posts can be scheduled.
4. Posting, then Posted. Scheduled posts are sent every ten minutes.
5. Failed or Skipped if something went wrong or you passed on it. Failed posts have a Retry button.

Post Now sends a post immediately from any status except posting or posted, which is handy for news that can’t wait for the schedule.

The calendar shows posts by platform and status, with filters for both, so a week’s plan is easy to check at a glance: which days are covered, which posts still need approval, and what failed.

Viral Topics: ideas from what people are talking about

Social › Viral Topics looks for subjects your audience is discussing right now. Click Scan Now and RankThat checks hot posts in relevant subreddits (detected from your site, or ones you add), Google News, YouTube searches, X trends and Google Trends. Each topic is scored for virality, relevance to your business and timeliness, with suggested angles, hooks and draft posts. Send to Calendar turns a topic into social drafts.

Treat these as prompts, not instructions. A trending topic is only worth posting about if the business has something real to add.

A worked example: Bean & Barrel Coffee

Bean & Barrel publishes two blog posts a month and has a Facebook Page and a LinkedIn profile for the founder. Their social channels had gone quiet for months.

On the first Monday of the month, the marketer clicks Generate Week with five posts per week. Three are repurposed from “How to dial in espresso at home” and “Cold brew ratios that actually work”, and two are originals about the shop’s seasonal roast. She edits each draft in five minutes: swaps a generic line for the actual tasting notes, removes a hashtag that doesn’t fit, moves the weekend post to a Saturday morning.

The Facebook posts go to the shop’s Page with a link to each article. The LinkedIn post, written for the founder’s profile, talks about why they switched to direct-trade beans and links to the cold brew article.

Midweek, Viral Topics flags a spike in Reddit discussion about a coffee price rise. The founder has an opinion on it, so the marketer sends the topic to the calendar, rewrites the draft in his words, and uses Post Now on LinkedIn.

By the end of the month, the social channels have posted every week, every post pointed somewhere useful, and the whole job took about half an hour a week.

What to post

A few formats work for nearly every small business, and the generated drafts follow them closely enough that editing is quick:

• The useful line from a new article, with a link. “Most water heaters last 8 to 12 years. Here’s how to tell if yours is near the end.”
• A question customers ask, answered in two sentences, with a link to the longer answer.
• Behind the scenes: the team, the van, the roastery. Start from an original draft and rewrite it with details only the team knows.
• Seasonal reminders: flush the water heater before winter, book the AC check before summer.

Avoid posting the same text to every network. LinkedIn suits the founder’s view on the industry; Facebook suits practical tips and local news; Reddit rewards genuine help and punishes self-promotion, so post there sparingly and only when you’d read the post yourself.

How it fits with your SEO work

Social publishing is deliberately placed next to the content tools:

• Posts are repurposed from articles written and published with the content writer, so new posts get attention on day one.
• The brand voice used for articles is used for posts.
• Viral Topics can highlight subjects worth a blog post too. If one deserves a full article, add it to Topic Ideas yourself.
• For local businesses, a steady social presence supports the same trust signals as reviews and citations in Local SEO.

Social posts aren’t a direct ranking factor, and RankThat doesn’t claim otherwise. The value is distribution: getting good content read, which is how pages earn links and mentions over time. See off-page SEO and digital PR for how that works.

What the social scheduler doesn’t do

Honest limits, so you can decide whether you need a separate tool:

• No analytics. It doesn’t report likes, reach or follower growth. Use each network’s own insights.
• No inbox or comment replies. It publishes; it doesn’t manage conversations.
• No paid social or promoted posts. RankThat doesn’t offer ads tools.
• X is copy and share only. Posts are drafted, but you publish them on X yourself.
• Instagram needs an image on every post, so text-only drafts can’t go there, and LinkedIn posts go to a personal profile, not a company page.
• Four networks. No TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube or Google Business Profile posts.

If social is a channel you run seriously, with community management and paid campaigns, a dedicated social tool will do more. If social is the thing that keeps slipping off the to-do list, keeping it next to your content calendar is often what makes it happen.

A weekly checklist

See pricing for what each plan includes. For agencies doing this for many clients, the agencies page shows how projects keep each client’s accounts separate.

Tip: post about each new article twice: once on the day it goes live, and once a few weeks later with a different angle. The second post often does better.