At Cosmic we always strive to find the best solution for our customers, even if that isn’t us; it’s built into our ethical roots. So this blog is a handy lowdown on the combination of tools we use to keep up our social media presence and provide you with great relevant information on a daily basis.
Buffer
This service is all based on queuing up content to be sent out on a schedule. It’s dead easy to setup you just chose the networks you want to send from and then assign times of the day to send out at. For example;
I might want to send from Facebook at 8am, 10am, 1pm & 8pm every week day, then at 5pm on Saturdays and Sundays.
Once that is setup, you simply write your post into the ‘create post’ box, attach an image or link (which it automatically shortens for you) and queue it up ready to be sent.
One of the reasons Buffer is such a joy to use is that it has its user experience spot on and it’s quick and easy to schedule a large amount of posts. Unfortunately its not all good news though.
One of the problems with Buffer is that you are limited (on a free account) to how many of each sort of account you can have. You are also limited to a queue of 10 posts (this may seem like a lot but when you’re sending out 5 posts a day to Twitter, it isn’t). Another frustrating aspect is that although it has a browser add-on which allows you to queue a link directly from the site, when it auto-fills the post text it starts every word with a capital letter which goes straight against our brand guidelines. Another downside is that you can’t receive notifications through Buffer so we have to have Hootsuite open in the background for the time being.
Feedly
The second tool in our kit is ‘www.feedly.com’ a free content harvesting tool with a tonne of great paid-for features aswell. We just use the free account as for what we want it to do it works just fine. The premise is that you put in your area of interest (for us technology news) and Feedly combs your favourite websites for interest specific content that you might want to read and share.
Then you can read the article from within Feedly or go to the website itself so that you can Buffer the content. You can view your harvested content in a big list of article titles and sources or a more visual view with pictures and links. You can also filter by source, date, theme and a host of other search conditions. You can theme Feedly & save your favourite articles as well as having Feedly keep a record of your recent findings in its ‘recently read section’. We find we usually stick to the standard picture view as it gives a really good overview of the news that day. The slight downside to Feedly is that the paid-for tool is by far superior and supports various integration features with other networks like Hootsuite, Pocket and Evernote, but only an advanced reader would take advantage of these.
Klout
You may have heard us talk about Klout before but in the last 6 months, it has become a main player in the social media world.
It’s main purpose is to measure the quality of your social media, thus helping you improve your following and reach bigger audiences. It has 5 main tools which are;
- Overview an overview of your followed content sites (a content harvester , sort of like a mini Feedly)
- Create a tool which helps you share content Klout suggests for your networks and gives you advice on your sharing habits
- Schedule a tool which helps you schedule at specific times bits of content (we particularly like this because it sends native photos to Twitter, thus stopping annoying links and showing pictures on your timeline) it also suggests your best times to share (though we’re not sure how accurate this feature is right now)
- Measure Which allows you to look back over time and see your engagement levels and most-successful posts. It gives you a more detailed insight into your current ‘Klout score’ , how to improve it and which networks are contributing to it the most.
We like Klout because it gives you something to measure against when you’re using social media and takes into account more than just level of following. It looks at the quality of your posts, the amount of engagements (ie. Replies, RTs, likes, comments, shares and favourites you have) and the relevance of your postings to your audience. Like Buffer, it also has its user experience spot on and is a joy to use. It also has a little mini version of the site in the form of a mobile app which gives you handy updates on the progress of your Klout score.
In all honestly, we couldn’t get by only using these three services. Hootsuite is essential for us to monitor all our networks (unless we want Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and Pinterest all open at once) however we think for content planning, distribution and measuring they are pretty hard to beat!