Tools of the trade: Onespacemedia's top tips for managing social media

Managing social networks can be a time-consuming affair. But targeting and building communities, finding quality content and organising that content is made significantly easier and more effective by the many tools set up to support the process.

From scheduling posts to identifying key trends, Communications Manager, Nicky Hughes, gives her top six tools for managing Onespacemedia's social presence.

Social media management 

Buffer

Buffer is essentially a social media management tool which allows you to schedule posts within user-defined time slots with a slick interface and some great features.

Like all social media automation apps, Buffer allows you to schedule one post across any combination of your networks, but where Buffer excels is in the detail. It automatically strips out network-inappropriate symbols (e.g. @ is removed from LinkedIn posts) if you want to post the same message across more than one channel, free combined analytics allow you to see how many people clicked on or engaged with your post and you also get a daily top post to allow you to quickly identify popular posts and steer content choices. 

The free version of Buffer allows you to schedule up to 10 posts for your social networks (the Awesome Plan at a reasonable $10/month allows up to 200 posts across 12 networks) and gives detailed analytics of each post - as well as emailing a weekly report with channel performance across metrics like engagement, community size etc.

Any social media management tool worth its salt has a Chrome extension allowing you to hit a button and schedule posts directly from a web page, but Buffer goes a step further - select any text with an article to use it as your post copy, as opposed to the default article heading. 

On top of its main function Buffer offers ever-improving daily content suggestions, segmented by genre, and they write their own blog which I highly recommend. There’s a sense of dealing with real people when you deal with Buffer - customers’ needs are highly valued and feedback is regularly encouraged. 

Oh, and did I mention the useful integrations? Here’s my favourite... 

News aggregation

Feedly

There seems to be no end of news aggregators out there but having tried a few, I’ve settled on Feedly. It’s a doddle to set up - just select your publications, categorise them and you’re good to go.

Every day Feedly loads up the top stories from all your publications on the homepage, then, click a publication to see the top stories for each day. The interface is pleasing to the eye, content is presented in a digestible format with thumbnail images - just click on a story for a preview giving you a flavour of the story. You can add it to your Buffer queue directly from the preview pane or click on to read on. The free version gives me everything that I need but Feedly pro offers some useful add-ons such as extra integrations and power searches.

Prismatic

So why have two news aggregators? Prismatic offers something slightly different. It uses social network aggregation and machine learning algorithms to create bespoke content within user-defined topics - giving the user a personalised feed of targeted content from your Facebook, Twitter and Pocket communities.

Combining Feedly with Prismatic gives us a far bigger pool of content to choose from, within a targeted framework of topics.

Community Management

ManageFlitter

Manageflitter is a social media management software app with a host of options to help you grow and refine your Twitter community.  

For the most part, I use ManageFlitter to identify who in my community is inactive/quiet, isn’t following back, and to bulk-follow users who might be interested in our tweets by running a keyword search.

Search results are packed with user stats to help you quickly determine who to follow or say farewell to - both of which you can do in-app.

If you want to know your tweet sweet-spot, ManageFlitter has a ‘powerpost’ feature which suggests when people you follow/are following are most active. The pro service allows you to cast your search slightly wider. 

Manageflitter also offers analytics as part of its pro package at $12/month. 

followerwonk

There’s a lot of overlap between ManageFlitter and followerwonk. Essentially, both offer community refinement tools through a range of search options, but followerwonk (part of Moz) has gone one step further in terms of analysis.

If you’ve ever wanted to analyse your competitors’ followers - or users they follow - a search by up to three twitter handles will deliver stats on where you overlap; very useful for competitor analysis and targeted community growth. 

Sorting and tracking followers/tweets and advanced analytics come at a hefty £99/month.

Hashtag analysis

Hashtagifyme

Hashtags are an integral part of the social media vernacular. They help users sift through the noise to find exactly what they’re looking for and help business attract users to their feed and pick out key trends. 

In an industry full of technical jargon, it’s important to be specific to attract like-minded users and hashtags can be the difference between a tweet being far-reaching and disappearing into the ether. 

By entering a hashtag into hashtagifyme you can quickly identify its popularity and how its usage breakdown between genders. If you want to drill down further there’s an option to track top influencers within a given hashtag - useful for refining your community.

The pro version offers ‘in-depth intelligence’ for $69/month (business package). 

In summary

With the right tools managing your social networks, finding great content and refining and building your community can be a time-efficient and effective process. We'd love to hear which tools work well for you - just leave your comments here.

Follow us on twitter.

For other articles from our 'Tools of the trade' series click here.

______________________________________________________



Read more

Looking for something specific?