Michelle Krasniak - Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies

Social media marketing can quickly consume all your waking hours — and then some. Just the thought of needing to post information quickly to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, Pinterest, and social news services might make any social marketer cringe.

Time to work smarter, not harder, with content-distribution tools to post your content to many places at once for tasks like the following:

Routine maintenance: Use a content-distribution tool whenever you make updates according to your Social Media Activity Calendar. What a timesaver!

Quick event postings: Share information from a conference, trade show, meeting, or training session from your phone by sending short text updates to Twitter and LinkedIn. Or take a picture with your smartphone and send it to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. To send something longer, use a distribution tool to post to your blog and Facebook.

Daily updates: Group all social media services that you might want to update with rapidly changing information, such as a daily sale or the location of your traveling cupcake cart by the hour.

If you have more than three social media outlets or frequently update your content, choosing at least one distribution tool is a must-have way to save time.

Some businesses prefer to craft custom postings for Facebook, Twitter, and other services based on the specific audience and content needs of each channel, whereas others find this too time-consuming. Do what seems right for your business: Automate cross-postings (set up a service so that postings on one social media service automatically appear on others to save time), customize by channel, or mix and match.

In addition to Hootsuite, OnlyWire, and other tools described in the next few sections, you can use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to feed content to users and to your various social media profiles. Keep in mind, however, that RSS works best with highly technical audiences. For more information about RSS feeds, see www.whatisrss.com .

You can select from several content-distribution services to syndicate (copy) your content from one social media service to another. All the services work roughly the same way, but each has its own peculiarities. Choose the one that’s the best fit for you.

Reconfigure your settings on content-distribution tools whenever you decide to add or drop a social media service or create a special-purpose group for marketing.

An easy-to-use app, Buffer ( https://bufferapp.com ) allows you to preschedule content distribution to multiple social media platforms. It uses its own built-in link shortener to gather and compare data about the performance of posts on various channels.

Self-described as “the leading social media dashboard,” Hootsuite ( http://hootsuite.com ) has expanded from its origins as a way to manage only the Twitter experience. From scheduling to stats, Hootsuite now integrates more than 20 social media channels, allowing multiservice postings from one location to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and your blog, among others.

OnlyWire ( http://onlywire.com ) updates up to 20 social networks simultaneously. It also passes updates between WordPress sites, RSS feeds, and social media channels.

OnlyWire also offers several handy mini-apps at http://onlywire.com/tools to facilitate sharing items quickly:

A developer API to custom-program content exchanges among your social media channels

A Chrome toolbar add-in that lets you quickly share web pages you like with your Facebook and Twitter accounts

A WordPress plug-in that automatically submits your WordPress posts to the social media services you’ve selected

An app to deliver material from RSS feeds to your selected social media channels

SocialFlow ( www.socialflow.com ) is a high-end distributor of content and paid advertising across multiple social media networks. The company uses specific data to schedule posts and activities for times when your target audience is active on specific channels.

Owned by Twitter, this tweet management tool at https://tweetdeck.twitter.com lets you schedule tweets, track engagements, and organize multiple accounts in one convenient location.

If you’re on your smartphone all the time, UberSocial ( www.ubersocial.com ) may be perfect for you. This Twitter smartphone app, available for Android and iOS, allows users to post and read tweets. Features vary slightly between the two device types, but all integrate LivePreview, which enables users to view embedded links next to tweets without closing the app and opening a new browser, making it an efficient way to use Twitter on your smartphone. Other features include cross-posting to Facebook, managing multiple accounts, and the ability to format your posts.

Long, descriptive URLs that are useful for search engines are also messy in email, text messages, text versions of e-newsletters, and blogs, and make it difficult to retweet within the character limits of some social-networking platforms. The solution is to snip, clip, nip, trim, shave, or otherwise shorten ungainly URLs with a truncating service. Take your choice of those in Table 1-2or search for others.

The downside is that the true owner of shortened URLs may be a mystery, so it doesn’t do much for your branding unless you select the option to create a custom URL. Figure 1-1 shows a typical URL truncating service and the result.

As always, enter the name of your URL-snipping service on your Social Media Marketing Plan. To make it easier to track URLs and their snipped versions, select just one service.

TABLE 1-2URL-Snipping Services

FIGURE 1-1:Enter a long URL at Bitly and receive a shortened URL in return.