Guides and Tutorials

1. Product Autopilot and its uses

Product Autopilot is the simplest yet powerful one to automate promotion of your products on social media. It automatically schedules and posts your products smartly. All you need to give is instructions.

Muliple tasks at the same time

You can create multiple Autopilot tasks. These can run together and automatically create multiple social media posts for you on a daily basis.

Autopilot tasks can be based on different criteria. Some of the most used ones are listed below.

• A separate task for each social media network
• A separate task for different categories of products
• A separate task based a board on Pinterest
• A separate task based on what time you want to post to your social networks

Note: when you sign up for Outfy, a default product Autopilot task with simple settings is created for you by Outfy. You can modify this task, or create more Autopilots, or even turn-off the default Autopilot. It's your call.

2. General settings

Task Names

Task names are useful to keep track of Autopilots you have created. So give a meaningful name to your task. Here are a few examples for your understanding.

• Morning Autopilot, if you are using it to share content in the morning.
• Dresses Task, if you are sharing only Dresses from your store.
• Pinterest Task, if you are using this Autopilot only for Pinterest.

You can give any name. It can be creative. It's your call.

Note: Please do not enter special characters in the name like apostrophe, exclamation, comma, full stop, etc.

Pick products

Tell your Autopilot in which order you want products to be picked from your store. To do this, go to the drop down with 3 options just below the task name.

• Latest Products - if you choose the option, latest products, your Autopilot is created using the latest products added to your store by you.
• Random & Latest Products - Here, the newly added products get the topmost priority and are picked first. The remaining products are then shuffled and selected randomly.
• Random Products – In this case, Autopilot randomly selects and schedules products from your store.

Set posting times

Here is where you decide the time range between which you want Autopilot to post on social media. For example, you can instruct Autopilot to post only between 9 AM and 5 PM.

Time zone

Outfy shows your default time zone from your profile. You can, if you wish to, change the time zone to schedule posts. For example - your time zone is EST-New York, but you want your postings to go between 2 PM and 4 PM PST – LA time. You can instruct Autopilot to do this.

Note: Between Time works on the 24 hours time format. In other words, 1 PM is 13:00 hrs and 12 AM is 24:00 hrs.

3. Primary settings

Post templates

Caption templates enhance your post. Outfy allows you to create these. We have a separate Templates Guide to help you understand it in detail.

Define which caption template you want Autopilot to use. You can either select a template OR ask Autopilot to choose randomly from your defined caption templates:

• Use a particular template if you want all your post templates to have a single type of caption.
• Use random templates if you have created more than one template and want Autopilot to choose randomly from among them.

Hashtag Cloud

A hashtag cloud is a group of similar hashtags related to your product, category or store. Outfy allows you to create multiple hashtag clouds to use in postings. There is a separate user guide that details how to set up and manage hashtag clouds.

In this setting, you can tell Autopilot how to use your hashtags. Choose which hashtag cloud Autopilot should use for your posts. There is also a way to map your hashtag clouds with your product categories. If you use that mapping, Autopilot will pick the hashtags for the correct board, based on the category of the product.

Categories/Collections

You can decide what categories of products you want Autopilot to pick to post on social networks. Autopilot allows you to choose a single or multiple product categories from which to create and schedule posts.

4. Network Settings

Choose networks

The social media networks you have connected to Outfy are shown here. You can choose which network you want Autopilot to share products on.

Each network has an ON/OFF. This is shown in the screencap. Based on what you choose, Autopilot will or not post to a network.

By clicking on three small dots (…) on each network setting, you can further decide network specific settings.

For example, on Pinterest, you can decide which board should receive the posts. These settings are available for most of the social networks, wherever applicable.

Note: Autopilot will work only if you have at least one network turned ON.

Set duration

For each network, you can set the duration between posts. If you try to post too frequently, your posts may be marked as spam by one or more networks and your account blocked.

Here are a few examples to show how this section works.

• Example 1: Time between 9:00 hrs to 21:00 hrs with a post on Pinterest every hour. Autopilot will create 13 posts on Pinterest from 9 AM to 9 PM.
• Example 2: Time between 9:00 hrs to 12:00 hrs with a post on Pinterest every 2 hours. Autopilot will create 2 posts on Pinterest, one at 9 AM and other at 11 AM.
• Example 3: Time between 9:00 hrs to 12:00 hrs with a post on Pinterest every 3 hours. Autopilot will create 2 posts on Pinterest, one at 9 AM and other at 12 PM.
• Example 4: Time between 9:00 hrs to 12:00 hrs with a post on Pinterest every 4 hours. Autopilot will create only one post on Pinterest any time between 9 AM to 12 PM, usually at 9 AM.

Though the times selected here are rounded off to the hour, Outfy adds or removes between 5-15 minutes from exact hours. This is done in order to insure social networks do not treat them as spam or automated.

For example, a post which is supposed to go exactly at 9 AM, may actually be set up anytime between 8:50 and 9:10 AM.

5. Miscellaneous Settings

Allow weekends

If you want Autopilot to schedule posts over week-ends, turn ON this button. Otherwise, turn this OFF.

Allow Reposting

Autopilot keeps taking your products as per your settings and creates a daily schedule for you. At one point in time, all your products will have gone to your social networks. Allow Reposting let's you decide whether or not you want Autopilot to stop or start repeating the products that have already been posted.

If you turn this ON and all your products have been posted, Autopilot intelligently reuses your products for new posts by selecting the products in round-robin fashion; meaning that the product which has been posted first, will be posted first again. This insures that the gap between two postings of the same product is optimised, i.e., maximum.