The best tools for social media
Want to grow your audience on social media – without spending hours a day on your phone? Nik Rawlinson reveals his secrets of success.
Social media just keeps getting busier and noisier. So if you want your personal profile to attract attention – or if you want your business account to perform as well as it possibly can – you need to make sure you’re posting regular content that’s worth interacting with.
That may sound like a lot to ask, but there’s a wealth of tools out there that can help with both sides of the equation. Here’s how you can spend less time posting and still attract a loyal, growing audience.
Cross-posting
Cross-posting – posting the same content to several platforms – is an obvious way to multiply your social media reach. But if you do it carelessly or to excess, it can backfire. If your followers connect with you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more, they’ll get fed up of seeing the same messages over and over again. And while cross-posting itself is easy, it becomes harder to stay on top of responses, as you’ll have to keep an eye on multiple platforms.
Still, cross-posting is a good tool to have in your toolbox, and it isn’t hard if you automate the process. Instagram is a good place to start, as it has built-in support for cross-posting your content to Twitter and Facebook. Since it’s owned by Facebook, integration with that platform is neatly implemented: your pictures will show up in friends’ timelines as if you’d posted them there directly.
If you cross-post to Twitter, however, you’ll just get a link to the original Instagram entry, rather than a nice image. To post your picture directly, skip Instagram’s built-in cross-posting tool and head over to IFTTT instead ( ifttt.com). Once you logged in, search for “tweet your instagrams” and you’ll immediately find an applet that will automatically repost full images to Twitter – although note that it only works for single-image posts.
Automate your research
IFTTT isn’t just useful for linking Instagram and Twitter. There are also applets for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube among others. For example, see ift.tt/2JHEr2R for an applet that automatically cross-posts your tweets to Facebook when you use a specific hashtag, meaning you can easily decide which should be shared, rather than having to take an all-or-nothing approach.
Other applets can help you keep track of what people are talking about, and ensure that you’re always posting timely, relevant content. At
ift.tt/2JB9yRO, you’ll find an applet that searches Twitter every hour for hashtags that match a specified search term. Any tweets that it finds are added to a Google spreadsheet for easy review. It’s a great way to monitor a story that’s relevant to your business, or to your personal interests.
If you work for a business that needs to keep a proactive eye on social media buzz, you should also check out the applet at ift.tt/2l8LYND, which updates your chosen Slack channel as soon as anyone posts a tweet that matches your search term. You can then respond or retweet right away – customer service agents, take note. Passive posting
IFTTT can even make social media posts on your behalf, to keep your followers up to date with your activity. The applet at ift.tt/2y9ptS6 will automatically tweet new favourites that you save to Pocket; at
ift.tt/2l54ZQV you’ll find one that will tweet out a link every time there’s a new post on your WordPress blog.
You will notice, though, that both applets are still triggered by something you do. If you want a fully automated system that can post in the evening and at weekends while you’re out having a life, turn to buffer.com.
Simply put, Buffer lets you queue up content for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest, which it will publish for you according to a schedule. With a free account, you can connect up to three social media accounts (although Pinterest isn’t included) and schedule up to ten items.
If you’re using Buffer for business – and a lot of people do – then $15 a month for a Pro account allows you to connect up to eight accounts, and queue up to 1,000 posts. Other plans cater for larger businesses, extending to more than 150 social accounts, with 25 team members and up to 2,000 posts at a time.
Buffer will automatically set up a schedule for you, so by default when you add something to the queue it will go live when the next posting time rolls around. Naturally, though, you can customise the schedule, assign posts to a specific slot or set a bespoke publication time, so your post coincides with an announcement, launch or the expiry of an embargo.
Better yet, Buffer has its own apps, allowing you to schedule content that’s drawn directly from other apps on your phone – and it integrates with third-party services such as IFTTT, Feedly ( feedly.com) and Pocket. Look sharp
It may be a cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it’s nowhere truer than on social media. Indeed, an image is often much better than a chunk of text: not many people will bother to read a lengthy screed on Facebook, and Twitter is certainly the wrong medium for long-form prose. Research by Buffer found that tweets with images received 18% more clicks than those without, 89% more favourites and 150% more retweets. If those stats haven’t convinced you that you need to be posting images, nothing will.
Not all images are equal, however. Eye-tracking studies conducted by Nielsen Norman Group found that decorative pictures in social media posts were completely ignored ( pcpro.
link/287nielsen). Rather, the research found that “users pay attention to information-carrying images that show content that’s relevant to the task at hand”. In other words, you can’t just throw any old image onto your posts – your pictures need to have a purpose.
Happily, creating information-rich graphics isn’t hard. Canva ( canva. com) and Adobe Spark ( spark.adobe. com) are two options that make it easy to find relevant pictures, overlay meaningful text and export your
results in the right shapes and formats for different social platforms. Spark has rudimentary video composition tools too, with eight video themes, widescreen and square formats, as well as a selection of royalty-free soundtracks to choose from. Canva and Spark have free and premium accounts, and Adobe’s premium offering is also included in a full Creative Cloud subscription.
Making an impact on LinkedIn
To an extent, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are much of a muchness – the same sort of fun, personal content generally plays well on all of them. However, LinkedIn, with its professional focus, is a bit different: whatever you publish could be seen as representing your employer, and could be referred to the next time you land a job interview.
That doesn’t mean that the same general posting principles don’t apply, though. Indeed, if you use the site’s publishing platform, Pulse, LinkedIn isn’t all that different to Facebook: you get a business blog attached to your profile, which aggregates your posts with other contributors’ offerings. You can add photos and videos to the body of each post, along with a featured image that appears at the top, and other LinkedIn users can like and comment on posts. LinkedIn itself provides interaction
analytics so you can monitor what is and isn’t working.
The first message then is not to neglect LinkedIn in your social media portfolio. One tip: for your featured image, choose something that’s not only relevant to your subject but striking enough to make people stop scrolling. The optimal size for this image is 744 x 400 pixels.
There’s another noteworthy aspect to LinkedIn, too: the SlideShare platform, which allows you to share entire presentations on the site – a great way to show what you’re doing professionally, or dig into a subject in a more accessible and visual way than would be possible in a Facebook post. Indeed, LinkedIn itself uses SlideShare to distribute its Publishing Playbook, full of advice for anyone just getting started with LinkedIn publishing ( pcpro.link/287playbook).
SlideShare supports PowerPoint, OpenOffice Presentations and PDFs of up to 300MB. If you need to use specific fonts, you should convert your presentation to PDF first and upload that, remembering that any slides that build up over multiple clicks will need to be saved as separate pages.
Nothing you upload to SlideShare is automatically added to your LinkedIn profile – but, in most cases, it makes sense to enable this, as it’s an easy way to help keep your public profile fed with fresh content.
Like Pulse, SlideShare maintains detailed analytics on the performance of your posts at slideshare.net/insight, where it tracks social shares, comments, views, actions and more – so you can monitor your performance over time, identify which content resonates with your audience and tailor your future posts accordingly.
Automation
Finally, because nobody has time to do everything they need, online or off, let’s look at a few more automation tools that can help you manage your social media profiles.
Chatfuel ( chatfuel.com) is a clever service that lets you build your own chatbot for Facebook. It’s entirely form-based, so you don’t need any programming experience, and you certainly don’t need to be an expert on Facebook APIs. For businesses that receive a predictable set of enquiries, a bot can be a great time-saver, freeing up staff and allowing customers to get an immediate response even outside of working hours. You can put together a basic Chatfuel-branded bot for free: if you want to get rid of the Chatfuel logo and manage your bot’s audience, you’ll need to sign up for a Pro account, costing $30 a month.
Post Planner ( postplanner.com) is a more reactive tool. It pulls photos and
articles from the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts you follow, along with RSS feeds you subscribe to and hashtags you’re interested in, then ranks what it finds so you can instantly see what’s getting the most engagement. You can then retweet, like or respond to the most popular posts, so you’re always on the ball. Like Buffer, it also has scheduling tools for unattended posting around the clock; plans start at $3 a month.
And if you want to build an Instagram audience, it’s worth looking at tools that automatically like posts and follow users on your behalf, in the hope that the posters will notice and follow you back. SocialDrift ( socialdrift.com) does this using clever algorithms that analyse hashtags, locations and followers of followers, but it’s steeply priced at $13 a week or $39 a month. RoboLike ( robolike.com) performs a similar service, liking other people’s posts on Instagram when they match your targeted hashtags, for a more affordable $7.77 a month.
Just one word of warning: before deploying any kind of automated service on a social network, make sure your use of it doesn’t breach the network’s terms and conditions.