Establishing your social media presence — Part 2: time saving tools
This article is part two of a series where we will share the experience of establishing the social presence for “The Agile Entrepreneur” on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest.
In part one of this series, we reviewed the definition of a message for “The Agile Entrepreneur”, and social media post strategy. In this article we review the tools being used to streamline the social media post process and gather data about our readership.
In order to be true to “The Agile Entrepreneur” mindset, our approach to establish our social media presence has been to formulate a desired outcome/goal, “do rather than theorize”, learn by analyzing the result of our “doing”, and fine tune for the next iteration, aiming to continually improve along the way.
Time saving tips to find the right content
Once the set of topics to associate with “The Agile Entrepreneur” was identified in part one, we now can use our favorite news reader, social network, or browser to identify and pre-select content for each topic.
In order to save time, we use Pocket, formerly known as Read It Later, in conjunction with the news reader. With Pocket, we can identify suitable content on the go, save the links, and tag them, according to our list of topics, making the post scheduling through Buffer or HootSuite much less time consuming.
Partial Pocket screenshot showing entrepreneurship tag
Social media control center
In order to simplify and centralize the control and automation of social media scheduling, we make us of two tools: Podio and Zapier.
Podio (a Citrix acquisition) is a simple front-end which can be sue to organize items. Podio use can be tailored to you needs with “apps”, which are good starting purpose-specific templates. We used the Social Media Post Scheduler app as a starting point, and customized its fields to meet our needs.
Zapier is a cloud integration platform, which allows us to “tie together” Podio and Buffer. By creating this integration (referred by Zapier as a “zap”), we simply need to “check” the desired social media channel in the corresponding Podio Social Media Post Scheduler, and Zapier will add the post information to the corresponding Buffer account.
Partial Zapier screenshot showing “zap” to queue post data from Podio Social Media Post Scheduler app to the corresponding Buffer account (in this case, Facebook page The Agile Entrepreneur)
Learning about your readership’s preferences
While specific social media providers (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+) might offer their own set of readership data, we found that by selecting a specific URL shortening service we might get even more information about our readership. While Bitly is a well-crafted and popular URL shortening service, we ended up selecting Google’s goo.gl as our URL shortening service, primarily due to its ability to display geographic readership information.
Please note that despite our selection of goo.gl as our URL shortening service, you might be better served by using Bitly, as Buffer natively supports using your own Bitly account to automatically create short links for you. By using goo.gl, we have to manually create the short link, adding to complexity in order to gain the geographic visibility.
It would be great to leverage a centralized dashboard like tool to view native data from each social media channel and from goo.gl URL shortening service. Unfortunately, so far, we have been unable to find such offering which would fit our shoestring budget. Please let us know in case you are aware of such capability.
PS.: Since this article was first published, Bitly now does offer geographic visibility and we recently started using Bitly.
Coming up next
On the next article of the series, we will share channel specific details, starting with Twitter and Facebook.
Note: Some details on how the tools mentioned are being used might have been omitted for simplicity. So, please feel free to use the comment box below to ask any necessary clarifying questions and we will either update the post or provide an answer directly to you question in the comments section.
This work by The Agile Entrepreneur (@AgileEntreprenr) was cross-posted here.
