Post Maker Review: Create hundreds of social posts in record time
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TL;DR
Post Maker has one job: to multiply your best content into as many posts as possible. Use it to flesh out a campaign, put your evergreen content on autopilot or create an entire year’s worth of posts in a heartbeat. Ideal for anyone sitting on good content and looking to increase their social media presence and engagement with minimum fuss.
Post Maker Pros
- 'Variations' feature
- Readymade 'Packs'
Post Maker Cons
- No RSS import
- Auto-variation fine-tuning
The Story
What is Post Maker?
Post Maker can turn a single URL or statement into hundreds of tiny variations. The tweaks are good enough to bypass Twitter’s repeat Tweet checks and allow you to be consistent but not repetitive. It’s a similar outcome promised by MeetEdgar’s auto-variations feature but with an emphasis on churning out the largest volume of posts possible.
If you’ve got your hands too full for social media, this simple tool is an easy way to compound posts and claw back time for other things.
Meet the Maker:
Phill Duffy
Phill Duffer is a solopreneur, who loves creating tools to help others.
A developer at heart, he cut his teeth in Software Development in the world of Microsoft SharePoint. He even wrote two books on the subject, a Microsoft one about integration with Business Data and another on SharePoint with jQuery!
After deciding to leave the corporate world behind to create a Data Mapping tool - Storism, he found marketing a challenge. Despite having some fantastic tools for scheduling content, he still wasn’t posting regularly, so built Post Maker for his own benefit, and then decided it could be useful for others. Turns out he was right!
The Product
How we tested Post Maker for this review
I reviewed Post Maker the moment it launched. Post Maker was running a lifetime deal on AppSumo at the time of review and they granted me free access. This came on the back of publishing reviews of Buffer, Publer, MeetEdgar, RecurPost and countless other social media schedulers, with MeetEdgar the closest competitor and one of a few social tools I pay to use.
I’m all for automating my marketing workflow, so I couldn’t wait to add even more automation and variation into my posts. Time to see if Post Maker could pass the test.
Getting started with Post Maker
I trust what I’m about to say will change given Post Maker is only a few weeks old. For now, the onboarding is hard to find. You land on an empty dashboard with zero instructions of what to do. Only by logging out and returning to the site homepage can you watch the product demo and find the service documentation. An easy thing to fix!
In essence, on Post Maker a ‘Brand’ is an account, team, client or similar. Whereas, a ‘Campaign’ is exactly as it reads. After setting up each, you can use the core Post Maker features to automatically generate posts for you to use with your existing social media scheduler via a CSV file. Most of the big boys are there, including MeetEdgar, Publer, SEMrush, Hootsuite. If your scheduler isn’t listed, contact support and Phill promises to add it.
And that’s the extent of the leg work. Post Maker does the rest when you post an article URL…
Post Maker features you’ll love
As the time of writing, Post Maker has an extremely tight feature set. It’s mission? To help you post as many variations of a post as it can, with as little effort as possible.
Let’s take a look at the two main ways of achieving this…
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💡 Inspiration: Suggested soundbites direct from a URL
Post Maker’s ‘Inspiration’ feature automatically creates tens, if not hundreds, of possible posts direct from a webpage. Unlike MeetEdgar’s version, there’s no AI at work here. Instead, Post Maker pulls out whole or part sentences for you to approve or reject.
I started by entering a typical Surges’ review. It returned 100+ possible posts, of which 5 were usable and could be deemed high quality without any edits. Behind the wastage is lots of one-word options plucked from H2 Headers and sentences without any context.
Post Maker fared much better when working with an interview-based content. This returned double the relevant suggestions (10) and many more could be added with a light edit – something Post Maker doesn’t yet allow.
To summarise, I much prefer MeetEdgar’s AI-driven recommendations which has the magic touch for picking quote-worthy posts, opting for quality over quantity. This feature is advertised as the main reason to sign up to Post Maker so it does needs further development.
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🔁 Variations: Subtle tweaks with dynamic content
This is more like it! If you want to create posts in bulk, this is a far quicker way to do it versus typing them all out by hand.
It’s a more manual process for sure, but results in many alternative versions of the same post based on dynamic content you define. You can speed things up further by saving your frequently used text as ‘variables’ (or ‘snippets’ as other tools call them) or using ‘Packs’. You can perform a similar trick for hashtags too.
I must admit I was sceptical about the ‘Variation’ feature. It looked far too much work for too little reward and I prefer drag-and-drop functionality or buttons over markdown instructions. However, I’m happy to admit I was wrong – Post Maker’s ‘Variations’ is a highly effective way at creating multiple versions of the same content in a heartbeat. Plus, it’s a feature I haven’t come across elsewhere.
I can’t help but feel that Post Maker would be onto an even bigger winner if it let you combine ‘Variations’ with ‘Inspiration’. Tiny variations of thumb-stopping content, automatically plucked from an article. You’d be sitting on hundreds of posts before you know it and one hell of an evergreen feed!
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🎁 Packs: Pre-made variables and variations
These readymade bundles can be applied to any Campaign in a single click, saving you from having to create them from scratch. Inspiration and ideas courtesy of the Post Maker team and other users.
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📩 Export posts to your favourite scheduler
Post Maker stops there. Any posting is done via your scheduling tool and a CSV download/upload. By selecting your scheduler upfront, Post Maker outputs content that aligns with the specific fields of that tool.
Alternatively, clicking on the tweet button next to a post pre-populates a post on Twitter. All you do is need to hit ‘Tweet’.
Things to consider
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Caveat: It’s still very early days
It’s almost cruel scoring a new indie tool built in public. I’m confident Post Maker will continue to evolve and add new features, so will continue to watch on with interest and update this review accordingly.
Post Maker Pricing & Offers
from £10 per month
There’s no free plan but this small price includes unlimited variations and exports. Extra team members and client accounts cost more.
Post Maker Alternatives
Social media schedulers significantly outnumber automatic post generators, so it’s refreshing to see another option.
There’s the curators, such as Quuu and Feedly, but Post Maker will largely compete with automatic reposters, such as RecurPost, Publer and MeetEdgar. All three offer an awful lot more, including scheduling, A/B testing, native video posting, RSS feeds, content libraries and AI smarts. You’ll pay more for the privilege of course.
At only £10 per month Post Maker is a nice little add on for anybody wanting to seriously bulk up their content library in one go.
Post Maker Support 👍 or 👎
Post Maker is light on support documentation and video tutorials, but that’s because the tool is itself lightweight. Once you grasp the basics, the tool is largely self-service.
That said, email support is on offer, should you need it.
The Verdict
Surges score
60%Post Maker is not your ordinary social tool.
Choosing to focus on rapidly generating as many social posts with as little effort as possible, it can generate hundreds of variations in mere minutes to support the upkeep of your accounts.
It’s perhaps not relevant for all your content, rather a slither of evergreen content and must-have products that are worth pushing time and again. This still won’t be for everyone, especially the social purists who slave over original content, which underscores it existence to serve agencies working across multiple clients or solopreneurs who have many plates to spin besides social media.
I’ve encountered more than my fair share of marketing tools and have a fondness for the ones that do one thing well, such as FOMO (social proof notifications) and Unbounce (landing pages). However, I can’t help but feel Post Maker needs to do more if it’s to stick to recurring posts and compete against the likes of MeetEdgar. Its ‘Inspiration’ recommendations need to be a bit smarter (less is more) and the whole process could be made easier with content sourced directly from RSS feeds and imports of your previous posts on social media, for example. It will be interesting to see how to develops from here.
You may also ask whether Post Maker is better suited as a free integration to the main schedulers rather than a standalone tool. Doubling down on ‘Inspiration’ and ‘Variations’ and adding the above missing features will ensure it stacks up on its own and is an no brainer investment every month.
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