One of my main goals this year is to increase the overall quality of my social sharing. This means:
- More likes and comments
- More retweets and replies
- More specific mentions of others
These goals all represent examples of personalized engagement. I do have the necessary tools to accomplish this.
Content Discovery
If you want to be able to share great content, first you have to be able to find that. Here are a few such services for your consideration.
Feedly – Feedly is my go-to reader. With Feedly I am able to subscribe to receive new articles from sites that I have already pre-qualified to consistently publish great content based on my personal areas of interest. Having a reader eliminates the need to either constantly go to individual sites just to see what’s new and/or clogging up your email inbox with new article notifications.
I review my articles primarily from my iPad where I have Feedly actually feeding into another application called Mr. Reader. Mr. Reader allows me to share any articles via Buffer or other specific social networks. I also send complete articles via email to either my SpringPad account or, quite often, to clients.
SimlarWeb – SimilarWeb (formerly Swayy) is an interesting application that is still in beta. Swayy discovers and then emails me content suggestions (one email digest per day) by gleaning those from my existing social network communities. Why would I share something that has already been shared by my communities? Because there are a lot of people who are in my communities (not theirs) who may have not yet seen these quality updates.
News.le – News.le scans the news (not social mentions) for articles that feature people who you are connected to on LinkedIn and then sends you an email alert when it discovers them. From there, News.le provides you with built-in sharing tools and pre-composes your update to include that person’s name/twitter handle and a congratulatory message. Nice!
Scheduling Updates
Buffer – Buffer is perhaps my most favorite sharing app. One reason for this is that they have managed to integrate Buffer with practically everything! Buffer offers two different types of scheduling. When originally introduced, the goal of Buffer was to allow you to meter your updates out based on a set schedule which you would establish. In other words, if you share a lot, you can do this at whatever pace you choose but, the app will keep these in your buffer and then trickle release them so that you do not flood your networks all at once. You can still do this but, now you can schedule specific updates to go out at a specific date and time as well.
HootSuite – HootSuite is one of the most popular social dashboards. It is also a powerful scheduling tool which not only includes specific dates and times to publish your updates but you can also have HootSuite pick the best times for you based on your audience’s activities. HootSuite is also stealing pages from Buffer’s playbook and it’s Hootlet sharing utility is popping up everywhere!
Auto-Publishing
While automation is something that I only suggest in limited doses, I am pragmatic about this in actual application. As a basic rule, if it is something that I was going to share anyway, why not automate that process. Examples would include:
- My own articles (like this one)
- Articles from sources that I have 100% confidence in that their stuff is top notch!
There are several tools to accomplish this:
HootSuite – HootSuite is more than a social dashboard and scheduling service. You can also set it to scan specific sites for new articles and then publish those to one or more of your social networks. From your dashboard go to “Settings” and then “RSS/Atom Feeds”.
Paper.li – Paper.li combines article curation along with social sharing and individual recognition. Articles can be gathered from several social network sources including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and YouTube and these articles are selected based on your specified keywords and/or hash tags. You can also add specific websites via RSS. A paper is then created and published on Twitter, with mentions of top contributors, and each article can then be read and/or shared to other social networks and people can also subscribe to your paper(s) and get them via email.
Other automation tools: There are a number of other tools that can be used for automated article posting. In most cases, your choice will actually be a matter of personal preference. For example, each seems to posts updates in a slightly different format so … what is to your liking? Experiment and see. Here are a few to consider:
- Networked Blogs – This is a “post to Facebook only” application and it will post to pages as well as profiles.
- Jetpack for WordPress – Jetpack was originally developed for WordPress.com sites and now is available for WordPress.org sites as well as a plug-in. Jetpack is actually a suite of services including “Publicize” which will automatically publish your new articles to one or more of your social networks.
- Dlvr.it and Twitterfeed – Both Dlvr.it and Twitterfeed are free automation services that will scan specified sites for new articles and then posts those to your specified social networks.
How about you? What are your favorite social sharing tools and why?
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
Craig M. Jamieson
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