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Ask HN: How well does your small company/agency do with social media?

4 points by coreymaass ↗ HN
If you work for a small company or agency, or own one, how would you grade your social media presence? Have you tried any content curation tools?

If you use a tool like Buffer, does everyone contribute links?? Is it managed by the company at all, or do they trust you to just post?

In my experience, I've heard "We know we should be doing more, but we're so busy" from nearly every company I've talked to, even those that manage social media for other people. Everyone is too busy working, to contribute to the company blog/twitter/facebook page (unless it's someone's dedicated job to do so).

I'm trying to gauge if this is as common a problem as I think it is. Thanks for any thoughts or feedback!

9 comments

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mijustin
At https://sprint.ly we use Buffer to manage outgoing posts. It's worked really well; especially now that they have the new scheduler: http://cl.ly/image/1I2g153e3c31.

We publish fairly regularly on our blog, so anytime we post something new, we schedule it in Buffer at the same time (using this schedule: http://cl.ly/image/3J1V3Q25242I)

coreymaass
Does everyone contribute links to buffer, and blog posts? Is it managed by the company at all, or do they trust you to just post?
mijustin
Everyone has the ability, but it's mostly just me who manages it.
Deyson
I also use Buffer. I add my posts and I can have them go to any of my social services I choose at a later time.

Simple to use and worth a try. :)

Chikodi
Right now I use Beatrix to automate social media posts on my various channels. Beatrix is nice because they curate highly shareable "evergreen" content. Beatrix offers thought leadership on demand, and supports team members.

Buffer is great, too, because it's easy to share things I've already read. Haven't been using it lately, but I was paying for a subscription for a while.

The issue with agency social media I imagine many people have is that it's a great way to be visible, but social media doesn't track well to ROI. People are "too busy" because they don't see immediate benefit of actively maintaining social media channels beyond exposure. Social media for agencies is a matter of deep not wide.

coreymaass
Very good point. I've mainly run into "everyone says we have to have a Twitter account, so we have one" which correlates to an unknown ROI. Makes sense.

I hadn't seen Beatrix. I'll check that out. Is it similar to curata and other "content curation" tools?

Chikodi
I don't know Curata, but Beatrix bills itself as your social media assistant. I'm checking out twibbl.io right now. It's great because it pulls in images along with tweets. Everything else is a total mess right now.
avni000
Services like Buffer or Hootsuite help so that someone can devote a couple of hours straight to find/write and schedule posts for the whole week. Makes it more of an ownable, discrete task (albeit for an assigned person) instead of a fragmented haphazard one.