To do a job well, you have to use the right tool.
Bob Ross knows exactly which brush makes his trees the happiest.
Emily Post would never dream of using the outside fork on her cornish hen.
And Bob Vila knows when to turn on the hammer option of his industrial- strength drill.
Similarly, social media marketers and community managers need to know which publishing tools to use for which job – be it curating a social stream, planning a campaign, or automating content from a feed.
Argyle Social (disclosure, I’m Founder and CEO at Argyle) recently wrapped up some new content that helps delineate the social marketer’s publishing toolbox.
You can download the social publishing whitepaper here. And I’ve summarized our thoughts here for your reading pleasure.
1. The Advanced Poster.
The Advanced Post is the Swiss Army Knife of social media tools.
It allows you to take a complex, integrated marketing message and federate it to multiple of social channels with channel-specific formatting and messaging. Additionally, the Advanced Post lets you to control other important aspect of your post like scheduling, campaign designations, and even setting custom web analytics parameters for your short links.
It’s not the fastest or easiest tool in the box, but it is very flexible and packs the strongest marketing punch.
2. The Quick Poster.
As its name implies, the Quick Poster is all about quick and dirty posting to your social properties.
Think of the Quick Post as the content bar at the top of Twitter.com, the “new Tweet” box in Tweetdeck, or the widget embedded in your Argyle Social Waterfall – it is tightly integrated into your engagement console and built for rapid response. No fluff, all substance.
If you’re queueing content as a part of a campaign and want to tweak messaging, formatting, or campaign settings, then the Quick Poster isn’t the right tool for the job.
3. The Smart Scheduler.
The Smart Scheduler is one of the shiny new tools in the community manager’s toolbox.
Posting a regular stream of content on your social properties takes a lot of time and energy. The Smart Scheduler simplifies this process by letting you set a schedule and queue up a pile of relevant content all at once that drips out over time according to a schedule designed to maximize engagement.
You can focus your time on customer engagement and strategic thinking while the Smart Scheduler does the work.
We just launched a smart scheduling feature in Argyle called Hopper – which we built specifically for social media marketers with a heavy focus on curation. Buffer is also a popular smart scheduling tool that is available for free.
4. The Feed Automator.
I find that the Feed Automator is one of the most underused tools in the community manager’s toolbox. I think that this stems from the fear of over-automating.
(A fear that we’ve debunked at Argyle, by the way. We found no statistical difference between the performance of content published via RSS and content published manually.)
The Feed Automator takes conent from a feed – a blog RSS feed, a comments RSS feed, a product catalog feed, etc. – and publishes it to your social profiles. There are simple tools for pulling this off like Twitterfeed. And there are more complex tools that enable content filtering, re-posting, and custom messaging.
And they all save marketers a ton of time.
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So there you go – different tools for different use cases. Do you already make use of these publishing tools for your social programs?
Which do you find yourself using most frequently?