5 Tools to Help You Manage Your Social Media Activity

I know many marketers struggle with managing their social media profiles whether for networking or for marketing their particular brands.

More often than not the problems are ‘time’ and ‘resources’. Time to update profiles and resources to find and curate the content to share. (Which sometimes also makes me wonder that it’s not been properly thought through)

So here are 5 tools worth checking out that might help you manage your social activity:

Followerwonk: Finding Profiles to Follow

Followerwonk is a very powerful tool that allows you to search for Twitter profiles by keywords within users bio’s and by location. So for the below example I am searching for ‘structural engineer’ or ‘engineers’ in the UK.

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As you can see you can also filter your results based on a minimum following or even by minimum tweets – so you could exclude everyone who hasn’t tweeted. One filter I would like to see added to this is ‘tweeted in previous 90 days’ to remove dead accounts too.

Anyway, one you press ‘Do It’ you get the following results page contain 206 structural engineers on Twitter: Show me who these 206 unsung heroes are!!!

IFTTT: Send Favourite Tweets to Pocket for Reading Later

IFTTT stands for ‘If this then that’. Basically it’s an automation tool that allows you to connect various apps to automate some processes and possibly save you some time.

I love IFTTT and the specific recipe (combination) which is ‘If I favourite something on Twitter then send the link to Pocket (reading app) for later’.

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So during the day whilst I am on Twitter I go around just favouriting a load of content which sounds interesting and I want to read when I have time. IFTTT then looks at all my favourite tweets every 15 minutes and sends the content to an app on my iPhone and my Mac for reading later.

So in the evening I spend 10-20 minutes just reading some of the stuff I’ve marked as a favourite that day. This can help save time having to source and read/verify content for sharing. You can just do it in one batch at a time that suits you.

Buffer: Sharing your content at set times during the day

Buffer is a clever scheduling service for a variety of social networks.

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As you can see from the above image you can connect profiles, pages and groups for Facebook and LinkedIn. (Some of you will be high fiving yourselves at this point).

With Buffer, you set planned updates and set the times you want updates to go out across each individual network. Tip: Don’t broadcast the same thing across all networks at the same time. It just pisses people off!!

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I’m not a massive fan of automating tweets but I do recommend it for some things now and again. For example, 2 or 3 tweets promoting my latest workshops are scheduled for a few days here and there – I don’t go crazy and schedule everything but the odd tweet here and there won’t hurt. Saves me remembering to promote it whilst I focus on more important stuff like making paper aeroplanes with my eldest son.

Anyway, say you have an upcoming event, there’s no harm in scheduling these tweets and updates across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ at different times over the course of the week.

Use this tool wisely. You can appear fake by over using it.

Just Quickly going back to IFTTT: Send read pocket articles to Buffer

Remember when we just sent all favourite tweets to Pocket for reading later?

Well why not set up another IFTTT recipe to say “If I mark a Pocket article as archived (or read) then send it to Buffer” which Buffer will then schedule to tweet at a set time the next day or later that day. This is a good way of verifying you’ve read something and approved it for sharing and save you remembering to tweet about it the next day.

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Unfortunately, you can’t control which Buffer social profile it goes to – I could be wrong – I think it only goes to the default profile which should be Twitter. Like I said earlier, I only use it now and again to save me the odd 30/40 minutes of manual work here and there but well worth getting creative with this shizzle.

Twitter Counter: View Statistics to do with your Twitter profile

I do like Twitter Counter because it’s so simple. Problem with many analytical apps is that they can be mind boggling. This is where Twitter Counter is different in my opinion.

It charts your follower count over a selection of time periods like today, last week, last month, last 3 months and last 6 months. You can take these graphs and insert them into your own marketing reports. You could even add your own annotations in where you see spikes.

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You can also compare your profile stats with say a competitor and chart progress over time.

You can also chart tweets v followers over time so that you can see when you don’t publish content your followers seem to drop also.

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Again, without getting to complex and over the top, it just shows you what you need to know. There is a paid version also which allows you to export data into spreadsheets but I’m not sure any construction company is THAT active to have accumulated that much data. I could be wrong.

Social Mention: For monitoring social mentions of your brand

I do like using Social Mention for monitoring certain keywords or brand names and seeing what content is out there. Social Mention scans the web for content which contains any keywords that you’ve selected.

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Now I do have to tell you that you may see a lot of nonsense included in your results if you have a brand that is also the name of a person or object and it seems to be far more popular than your brand.

However, you can use clever search operators to filter your results to exclude and include certain words.

The results are then shown like a Google results page but with some nice little stats on the left hand side. Not 100% sure how ‘passion’ is scored so please don’t ask me. I tend to ignore sentiment and passion completely. Try telling the CEO of your company that your social passion % is 67.

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The above results page is for the search “cibse” and you can see the content as well as the top keywords in the left column and some nice metrics such as how many hours per mention and when the last mention was.

Now, something which is equally as important is the image below which didn’t fit into the screenshot above. It shows which sources contain the most mentions. In this case it’s on Twitter followed by Flickr. That’s interesting.

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Turns out that it’s photo’s from the CIBSE Building Performance Awards 2014 as you can see below.

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So there you have it, 5 tools to help you out and some neat tips and tricks in there too.

Hopefully you found this useful and if you have any questions then please do email me, tweet me or contact me.

If you use any other tools that may help readers then please do let me know via the comment section below.

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2 thoughts on “5 Tools to Help You Manage Your Social Media Activity

  1. Jacqui

    That’s a very good list of tools for different needs when managing social media. I especially like Followerwonk, but I’m also a heavy user of Twitonomy which comes in very handy for identifying most engaging tweets and analysing other users’ follower base.

    Reply

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