Make Social Media Easier – Use These Tools!

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Of all the concerns I hear in my social media workshops for business owners, first and foremost is the concern about the time required to mount a quality social media strategy. Every successful business is run on the question of ROI: what return will I get for my investment of time or money?

One way of tipping the equation favourably is to reduce the investment of time. As the world of social media matures, a growing set of tools is evolving to support businesses in managing their social media campaigns.

They do this in three ways:

• They bring your various channels together in one interface to allow you to see them all at once (called aggregating)
• They link your various channels together
• They support effectively chunking your schedule by allowing you create content in one sitting that can then be ‘dripped’ out onto your channels over subsequent days or even weeks

Here is a short list of social media management tools that make my life easier:

• Google Tools (Reader & Bookmarks)
• Networked Blogs
• Tweetdeck
• Sendible
• Gist
• Constant Contact

RSS Symbol

Google Reader and Google Bookmarks (www.google.com/reader & www.google.com/bookmarks)

Google Reader aggregates the various blogs you follow into one place in your Google/Gmail account. Google Bookmarks collects all the websites you want to track (including blogs) into a toolbar for you to use in your web browser.

For many businesses & professionals, blogs are the heart of their social media strategies. The best way to stay on top of important blogs in your industries or professional areas is through RSS subscriptions. I have tried a number of ways of collecting all of my RSS feeds into one place, but Google Reader is my favourite.

RSS readers have been around for a long time, and they are still a very important social media management tool. If you see the RSS badge (the orange one above) and click it, your browser will open a window giving you various options to subscribe to the blog. You can use email-based readers like Outlook RSS Feeds reader or web-based readers like Google Reader.

Many blogs you visit will offer an email subscription as the most visible choice. There is a significant problem with this: most of our email inboxes are already overloaded and overstressed. The last thing we need is to have important blog content buried in the middle of messages. The blog articles could provide important information, but you will probably just hit ‘delete’ in your haste to get through the pile of emails.

I use Google Reader because it gets articles out of my inbox, and when I travel I am able to access my blog list from any computer or location in the world (including my Blackberry).

Google Bookmarks takes my reader (and other Google products like Translate and Bookmarks) and puts it on my browser’s toolbar, making it very easy to access.

I encourage all of my clients to get Gmail accounts. While there are still many rough edges to Google’s services, as a collection they represent the best tools currently available for managing your productivity online. Especially for free!

Networked Blogs (http://www.networkedblogs.com/)

Networked Blogs is a Facebook Application that posts blogs (yours and others) to your Facebook Profile or business Page. This is an important linking tool.

One way to reduce your time investment in social media is to recycle content. You can do this by linking and promoting the work of others, or by recycling your own content through different channels. Networked Blogs is a Facebook application that does both. By taking new posts from your blog and others you choose, it provides fresh content to your page without your having to do anything.

The user interface for Networked Blogs is not intuitive, but worth digging into for the value it adds to your social media activities. If you get stuck setting it up, send me a note and I can probably walk you through it.

TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/)

Tweetdeck is a great way to quickly dip in and out of my social media feeds, review my Twitter Lists, and quickly post something to multiple sites.

Tweetdeck an aggregator that collects your Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Foursquare feeds into one place on your desktop. The software not only organizes all of these channels into separate vertical columns that allow you to see your social media feeds in one glance, it allows you to create additional columns based on things like your Twitter Lists (people you follow, collected into one group based on a similarity). For example, I have a list of people I follow who live on Vancouver Island. Having that list as a separate column in Twitter allows me to ensure that when I have limited time, I can at least check in with the people literally closest to me.

TweetDeck can be installed as a stand-alone desktop client. It is fast and clean.

Gist (www.gist.com)

Where TweetDeck organizes all of your social media content into columns by service, Gist organizes the content by person.

For each contact Gist brings together their activity on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other sites. In Gist, your contacts can be sorted by importance to you in your life or business. Does being ‘sorted’ or ranked make you uncomfortable? Get used to it. Gmail already does it with their popular Priority Inbox. There are rumours that Facebook’s email service will have a ranking system built in as well. Gist brings the concept front and center.

Only have 10 minutes to catch up? Don’t sort through pages of ‘less important’ content to connect with the people you care about most, use Gist. The program allows you to catch up with the important people in your online life in the limited amount of time you have.

Like other similar services (including LinkedIn and Xobni [http://www.xobni.com]) Gist also has a free Outlook client that allows you to see peoples’ social media activities from within Outlook!

Sendible (http://sendible.com/)

The listening and connecting aspects of social media is the part many businesses do not pay enough attention to. The tools I listed above make it easier to ‘listen’ to your network. Sendible is a little bit different. It provides some support as a listening tool (including some interesting ways to analyze online sentiment about your brand), but its real value is in the ability to manage the posting of your content. Sendible allows you to target and schedule posts.

Sendible aggregates WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, LinkedIn, Flickr and many other channels. Once you have chosen your channels you can schedule when the post goes out, and even how many times the post goes out if you want it to repeat (often a good idea on Twitter with its high rate of content turn-over).

As with RSS and reader clients, this is a support in developing healthy priority-management habits! Rather than interrupting one thing after another to get your Twitter and Facebook posts out regularly (which is important when you are building readership), sit down for an hour or so twice a week, write your content, and schedule it for release in a ‘slow drip’ over the next few days!

Constant Contact (http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp)

Constant Contact is in my mind the premier email newsletter management service for small businesses and organizations.

Constant Contact manages all of your newsletters and contacts in one place. But the heart of Constant Contact is its ability to generate very attractive and readable HTML newsletters that can be matched to the rest of your visual brand.

The business power of the service is that it allows you to track every single action that your readers take from the moment they open (or don’t) your newsletter: who opened it, which links they clicked, if they forwarded it, etc. This allows you to really tune your content to get the highest conversion rates (actions like clicking through to your website) possible.

Newsletters don’t have the sex appeal or the viral possibilities of true social media platforms, but they lead to more actual business. By a long shot. Also, Constant Contact has really embraced the ability of newsletters to promote your other social media activities, and included a number of very easy ways to embed social media links and calls to action at different points in your newsletter.

This article is an excerpt from my eBook Building Connections for Small Business, available for download here. To find out about Social Media workshops, check me out here.

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