5 Ways to Save Time Blogging with Squarespace 6
Bloggers know better than anyone that most of the challenge in making your blog posts successful is finding the time to blog. This time-intensive marketing tactic can produce new business at a lower cost than most other marketing channels, yet people struggle to embrace blogging because of the time involved. As luck would have it, Squarespace 6 will bring five time-saving new features that will help bloggers publish more efficiently and, as a result, reap the business benefits that go along with a great blog.
1. Social Media Sharing Buttons
The new version of Squarespace will allow you to add social media sharing buttons to your blog through a simple new interface. The setup follows each social network's standard third-party integration process. To enable it, simply click a button within your admin controls and the network turns from grayscale to color, turning on the integration with your blog. From that point forward, readers will be able to share your blog content via the social networks you choose without any cumbersome HTML snippets.
2. Custom Social Media Updates When You Publish
I've never been a fan of having your website auto-publish social media updates when you pubilsh new blog or website content, until now. Once integrated, you can set the update that will go out on each social network once your new blog post publishes. Squarespace has even included a convenient shorthand system that dynamically pulls in post elements such as the post title, author and URL.
3. Improved Access and Control Over Post Details
I'll personally be saving some of the most time with the next set of new features, all bundled together under the Options section of the blog post editing interface. Squarespace has vastly improved post details access and control. These new features include quicklly adding blog post thumbnail images (for use with excerpts), custom URL control, and the ability to change the author of a blog post.
4. Content Review Workflow Built Right in
Up until now, managing multiple editors in Squarespace hasn't always been easy. But now schedule your posts, mark them as private, or event request review. It will be interesting to see how robust the review interface will be, but often even the most basic of workflows are a vast improvement over the manual processes some editorials teams are forced to adhere to due to the lack of sophistication of their blogging platform.
5. Easier Embedding of Social Content
This last feature demonstrates Squarespace's commitment to being the most elegant and sophisiticated web publishing platform out there. It's still being perfected, but you can now enter the URL of a Twitter tweet or YouTube video, and Squarespace will automatically figure out how to best embed it into your blog post. Once embedded, you can also go in and tweak how it is presented on your site. Talk about a time saver!
What do you think of these new time-saving blogging features of Squarespace 6? What features save you the most time when you're blogging? Does the writing itself or a lack of efficiency features baked into your blogging platform contribute to more of your time-related challenges with blogging?
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Reader Comments (4)
....but what about news of its actual release? Screen shots and simmering hype is becoming rather lame a year down the line!! ;o(
This is a fair question. Yes, the screenshots are great, but fans of Squarespace are getting antsy. I've been hearing more date ranges being thrown out lately by knowledgeable parties in the neighborhood of as little as three months from now. We'll have to see if that date holds true. Regardless, I'm happy about the future changes (and yet completely understand the sentiment of those that are tired of waiting).
Great post! I think these features are outstanding. Coming from my experience working with many clients on V5, the most beneficial aspect of these new V6 feature is the lack of steps involved in actually getting some of these things done. Right now, it's hard for non-technical clients to mange all of the aspects surrounding blogging, and "getting it out there". V6 really makes an effort to create a seamless experience and it seems like it does it quite well. No more browser extensions and no more extra steps to post it in various places.
Aside from those features, the seamless embed stuff is just fantastic. Squarespace really knocked it out of the park in terms of getting content into the site.
Jason Barone
Designer/Developer at Launchfront.com - Frustration-free Squarespace Websites for Small Businesses
jason@jasonbarone.com - jasonbarone.com
Josh, so glad I stumbled across your post on this! I'm a proud squarespace user, running several sites and blogs on the platform! And from Minnesota - Minneapolis myself as well!
When are all these updates coming? I don't see them yet on any of our sites.