With our normal update scheduling system, you are required to enter either a fixed date and time or a relative time on every update that you schedule. But what if you had a bunch of updates and you just want the system to drip-feed them into your social accounts, without having to worry about scheduling each one individually?

That’s where the new Update Queues come in.

Each Queue has an update Reservoir attached to it. You put updates into the reservoir, and the Queue drip-feeds those updates into your social accounts over time.

You can connect a Queue to one specific social account, or you can connect it to several social accounts (in which case it will simultaneously drip-feed the updates into all those connected social accounts).

You can also connect more than one Queue to a specific social account, which means you can have several Queues that automatically feed that social account.

For example:

1. Let’s say you create one Queue that you call your “quotes” queue, you also create another Queue that you call your “interesting links” queue, and you create a third Queue that you call your “cool photos” queue.
2. You connect your “quotes” queue to your Twitter account and your Facebook account to drip-feed your quotes into those accounts at a rate of one quote every 12 hours.
3. The “interesting links” queue you connect to your Twitter, StatusNet, and Facebook accounts, and you configure it to drip-feed your interesting links into those accounts at a rate of one update every 3 hours.
4. Lastly, you decide to connect your “interesting photos” queue to your recipes Facebook Page account and your cooking-related Twitter business account, because you’re only going to put links to pics of prepared meals into that reservoir, and you drip-feed your photo links into the accounts at a rate of one update every day.
5. Optionally, you can tell the system to drip-feed the updates only on Monday through Friday, between 8:00 AM and 6:00 PM (these days and times are fully configurable per queue).
6. Now all you need to do is make sure that there are updates in those reservoirs. The system does the rest. You don’t have to spend one second on scheduled dates or times.

If you want, the system will email you when a reservoir has run dry, so that you can add more updates to it.

You add updates to a reservoir with either the standard New Update form (which you use for creating a new scheduled update), or you can bulk upload updates into a reservoir using the Bulk Update Upload feature.

Update are drip-fed from the reservoir in the order they were added, in other words, first-in-first-out.

The drip-fed updates automatically appear as scheduled updates in update lists in SocialOomph from where they are then published to the social accounts by the system.

The Queues feature is available under “Scheduled Updates, Queue Reservoirs” in the menu.

Queues are available only to SocialOomph Professional users.