•  Getting the stories into the follow.it system

The first step is that we (follow.it) realize that you published a new story. If you entered the story directly (manually) on follow.it, the story is in our system instantly. If your feed is an RSS-powered feed, we screen 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. Also, if you're on a premium plan, you'll see the option to initiate the feed screening manually any time by clicking of a link that will show on your feed page.

Note: if you are using WordPress you can install either the Ultimate Social Media plugin (which also allows you to 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.