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My Two-step Social Media Starter Plan

Posted By Guest Blogger 26th of October 2012 Social Media 0 Comments

This guest post is by Eric Binnion of Art of Blog.

You can’t deny the power of social media. But, if you’re anything like me, then you also realize that effectively running social media accounts can take up tons of your time.

That is, if you let it. I’d like to show you my streamlined, two-step process of curating great content, posting throughout the day, and keeping in touch with the different accounts I manage.

Step 1. Who else wants to know where to find great content?

After I took over several Twitter accounts earlier this year, I quickly realized that to get interaction on Twitter I needed to do one of two things:

  1. Be interesting.
  2. Share great/interesting content (this is called curating).

For me, I knew that it would be easier to find and share great content than it would be to stay entertaining. Being interesting is a lot of work!

When I first decided to go this route, I followed a lot of people on Twitter and then reposted the same links they had (usually without giving them a mention or anything). Yes, horrible I know. But I wanted to make myself look like the authority, right? And I’m sure I’m not the only one of us here who ever did that…

This seemed very inauthentic to me, though. So, I was very excited when I heard of a tool called Prismatic. Prismatic is a free service that will deliver content to you based on the interests that you select. Below is a screenshot of the interest selection process in Prismatic.

prismatic-interests

Pretty simple, right? After you go through the interest selection process, you are presented with a feed that has tons of content in it! Your Prismatic homepage feed will reflect a mixture of all of your interests. But, if you’re like me, and you post on several blogs with different topics, you may want to narrow down to different topics. You can do that by clicking the More link by Home in the sidebar, as you can see in this image.

prismatic-feed

Once you’ve got your feed all set up, you just need to find a good way to automate the posting.

Step 2. One social posting tool to rule them all

Okay, so that headline is a bit ambitious. But I truly love Buffer, a web app that allows you to drip-feed content to your social accounts over time. With this tool, I am able to go through my Prismatic feed, find great content, click one button in Chrome or Firefox, and then it’s scheduled to go out to my social media followers!

Buffer also includes analytics that let you see how many times a link of yours was clicked, the estimated reach, and the number of mentions and retweets it got. These are fairly simple analytics, but they allow you go back through your tweets and see what resonates with your audience.

buffer-stats

Buffer also helps you build relationships on Twitter by prompting you to follow and/or thank those that retweet your tweets.

Social media made simple

This may not be the best way to manage social media. As my professors say about our programs, “there are always 1,000,000 solutions. Find the best one for you.” This is a good method to use for those that do not have much time to devote to their social media.

Combining Prismatic with Buffer will allow you to curate great content and build relationships with those who follow you. As you build up your reputation for recommending great content, you can then more successfully promote your own content.

Which tools do use to manage and build your social media presence? Share them with us in the comments.

This guest post is written by Eric Binnion of Art of Blog. He loves blogging, programming, and playing with his crazy son.

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Comments
  1. Thanks for sharing these tips. I was not aware of the apps you discussed, but will be checking them out. I would also recommend others to try Google Alerts to stay imformed about topics they wish to cover.

    • Google Alerts is another great way to stay informed about topics. I personally like the feel of Prismatic much more though ;)

  2. Well, your idea of social media marketing / starting is great to go. Many of us, are currently addopting the same tactics to get notfied by the community as fast as we can.

  3. Hey Eric, Thanks for letting us know about the Prismatic tool, I’ve never heard of it and would love to try. However I do use AddToAny tool for one social posting rule all of them and is great too than Buffer.

    • Hey Ehsan,

      AddToAny is cool, but I have no desire to maintain contact with all of the social networks. It’s time consuming trying to keep up with and post content across just Facebook and Twitter for the several blogs I manage.

      That being said, Buffer is not a tool that is meant to post to all social networks. It is a tool that allows you to easily schedule your social posting in the future. That means I can spend one hour today, and have posts scheduled throughout the next week across the 3-4 websites I manage. That’s the real beauty of Buffer.

  4. I have been using hootsuite to manage facebook and twitter right now. It works fine but I really miss pinterest in there. I wish they would add pinterest too.

    • Anshu,

      I liked Hootsuite for the couple of weeks that I use it. Hootsuite also recently launched an auto-schedule feature, which more or less adds the same functionality of Buffer. But, I find Buffer simpler, more intuitive tool to use.

  5. Hey Hamza,

    Thanks for leaving a comment. I think this is definitely a great tactic to use to get started. There are definitely ways it can be improved though.

  6. Arlene Batada says: 10/26/2012 at 6:43 am

    Good job. Keep it up!!!

  7. This is actually the true art of blogs Eric. I love your ideas about running social media I never heard of those steps and I think they sounds helpful to me,. I’m looking forward to giving a try!

  8. Thanks for letting us know such inspiring tools Eric. I think Problogger is easing our ways and it is high time I shift to that; sounds so useful to me, keep up the great job!

  9. Great ideas Erick! I am definitely going to try that. I mean the prismatic feed. Thanks for the information.

  10. Actually, I have never thought of doing that with my twitter. It was good of you to have brought it up Eric!

  11. Thanks for a great post..That’s a great tip for new bloggers like me and i got some great information about social media now
    At last thanks for a great post…

  12. I have been searching for a while for system for social media, The above 2 app just did the trick.

    I have implemented them and it just take minutes to provide great value to your followers.

    Thanks a lot for sharing this knowledge!! Appreciate it

  13. Hi Eric,

    Prismatic is one of the many news curation app, I use Flipboard more for the news feed…the other worth considering are Taptu, Pulse news, Feedly and news360. Each of them have their pros and cons.

    As for Buffer, I find it very useful and effective too.

    Thanks for sharing.

    Cheers!

  14. I just wanted to add a similar app to Prismatic. Zite builds your content based on your chosen interests, but also on your Social Media accounts contents- what people in your Twitter or Facebook streams are posting. Then you have additional option of liking or disliking and even blocking the sites you do not find interesting, and after few months, you get it really tweaked to give you overview of content in your favorite topics. I am discovering blogs I would never find otherwise, which makes the content I curate so much more interesting.

  15. Hi,

    Excellent post. If you have a good content and good title then you can get a lot of content viral. Once the content gets viral then you can earn a lot from it.
    It seems that Title and content are too good things that we should concentrate !

    Thank you

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