When do notifications get sent?

The process of sending notifications is comprised of two steps:

Getting the stories into the follow.it system

The first step is that we (follow.it) realize that you published a new story. We do this by screening your website (to be more precise: your RSS feed) in regular intervals. If you are on the Basic plan then you can expect this to happen every 5-6 hours. It is much faster if you switch to the Cool or Super-cool plan.

Note: if you are using WordPress you can install either the Ultimate Social Media plugin (which also allows you place the follow icons & form on your website) or the RSS Redirect plugin. In both cases your website will ping us immediately if a new story got published, which speeds up the process a lot.

You can see which stories are in our system on your feed page (e.g. follow.it/your-feed-name).

Sending of the emails

Once the stories are in our system, the time of sending depends on the selections your followers made when they followed you. If they selected “Newspaper” then your followers will only receive one email per day at a specified time (typically at the time they followed you).

The purpose of this is that your followers don’t get too many emails, but all messages of that day into one email.

If they selected "Single email"-delivery instead, then we send out the emails shortly after they entered our system.

As publisher you can select if the default option should be “Newspaper” or “Single emails”, and also change it for existing followers.

For all other (non-email) delivery channels, there is no “Newspaper” equivalent, so updates get sent out without any artificial delays, similar as with the "Single email" delivery as outlined above.