Chris Abraham
There aren’t enough nanoseconds in the entire universe to populate all the social media content to cover even a small brand if you’re not passionate about social media or if you’re not a natural communicator. If you feel deep contempt for social media in the first place, I don’t know what to tell you.
You’re kind of screwed. Or, you were until now. There are loads of very sophisticated tools that allow you to put a fraction of the time — and sometimes just a little bit of money — that you would have in order to make sure your social media platforms and profiles aren’t neglected and your online brand doesn’t end up a ghost town (remember, your online properties are your best face forward outside of whatever storefront and community outreach you engage in face-to-face on a daily basis — you do realize, don’t you, that social media isn’t optional anymore? Any more optional than opening a business at all?). Here’s a good start.
SOCi
SOCi is a unique service. It’s a little like content-farming. When you set up your SOCi account, you can break discrete tasks down into search and share. SOCi does an amazing job automagically service up content into predefined categories that you can sort through and then collect into a library to be used later or by someone else in your group, share it immediately across the social media platforms you’ve linked up to all your respective Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles.
If you’re not happy with the content-à-porter they offer, you’re in luck. The real beauty of the SOCi platform is that either you or someone in your group who is especially gifted in the research department can search as deeply and as specifically as you like, need, or have time for, across news and blog content, of course, but also across Facebook as well, which is a real boon. And then, after you’ve mined all of the content that you, your organization, your agency, and your clients need, you can then queue them up to be shared across any or all of them.
And, from SOCi’s version of ready-to-wear, the content can be as customized, adopted, rejiggered, and embellished as you like, from adding higher-quality images to the posts. And you can dive as deeply as you like, go as granular as you’re willing to go. And you can tailor your content as completely as you like, turning other people’s content, and other people’s links into your own, reframed in such a way that you can turn something that could be just considered to be link-dropping and link-baiting into something deeply bespoke and engaging to your core community.
The thing I like the most about SOCi, however, something that’s also shared somewhat with Buffer, is that you can work really hard over the course of an afternoon of heavy, deep, research, and then queue it all up or save it to the library and then you have everything sorted out for the next week or even month. So, you can easily block off some time once-a-week or once-a-month, every week or month, and then queue up all your social media content sharing into one push that can then be calendarized into your editorial calendar all at once.
There’s even a cool feature that forces all shares to be reviewed by the client before going into the client’s posting queue. Finally, there are loads of other client-centric and client-facing tools, including a page designer to help you build up the nicest Twitter profile possible for your brand, including customized and branded header photos for Twitter and the like.
Buffer
Don’t let Buffer fool you. It’s a very powerful tool that can allow you to fill your entire editorial calendar using a combination of RSS feeds and recommended content in addition to being beautifully integrated into most of your social media platforms.
And, if you install the Buffer App onto your PC, Mac, iPhone, or Android, you can share to your Buffer queue across any number of platforms from anywhere. So, no matter what you’re reading, what you’re watching, or what you’re reviewing, if you can share it, you can queue it up on your Buffer queue.
And don’t get cheap because Buffer has business plans that allow you to really load up on profiles, queued content, and the like. And, if you’re a nonprofit, Buffer will offer you 50% off of their monthly fees of $ 50, $ 100, and $ 250/month.
Me? I’m currently paying $ 10 per month on the Awesome plan which allows me to connect up to 15 RSS feeds to each of my profiles, queue up 200 posts over 12 social profiles via 2 team members (still Buffer-single).
I just noticed that my Buffer and SOCi queues were empty. See, that’s the most important part of the entire equation, now isn’t it: prioritization and commitment. It doesn’t take much oversight to put all of your properties into a stasis that will soon become a social media ghost town of your own making.
Some other tools I use on a daily basis to keep connect with content both personally, to keep me at the top of my game, and professionally as sharing-fodder for both my profiles and my clients’: GaggleAMP, Reddit, Feedly, Flipboard, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, NYT Now & New York Times app, Washington Post app, and the local news.
Good luck! Please let me know if you have any other cool content-discovery and sharing tools I might be able to add to my quiver of cool social media tools. Now, go git ’em lion (an ode to Cecil the lion)!
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