Cool tools to make social media easier
Repeat your tweets
This is crazy good news if you’re time crunched.
There is such a glut of content out there (some of it is even good), that we’ve always recommended you should reuse and republish your best content, especially as your lists grow, regardless of social media platform.
Who’s got time to keep coming up with genius content?
What if you already peaked with your best content and your new audience hasn’t seen some of your best stuff yet?
All kidding aside, for Twitter and to a lesser extent, Facebook, an analysis of 1 million tweets supports our advice.
Wisemetrics lives up to their name with the following analysis of how your content holds it value better than your used car.
- On average, the second tweet about a news get 86% as much performance as the first one
- The 6th time you’ve posted the news, you’re still get 67% as much performance as the first time you posted
Do yourself a favor and reword it a bit each time, but if you’re only tweeting your best content once, you’re wasting time and money.
Repeat your Facebook Posts too!
Griping about organic reach being down, or picking up your marbles and leaving Facebook altogether like Copyblogger did, isn’t going to make you feel better.
Or do your business any good either.
If you’re like me and most of my clients, you HAVE to be on Facebook because your audience is there checking out pictures of their grand-kids, cat videos, or stalking the people they went to high school with.
No judgment.
Here’s a great work around.
First, the performance of a repeat post on Facebook doesn’t hold it’s value as much as I just showed on Twitter.
There’s a 38% loss of performance at the 1st repetition on Facebook vs 14% on Twitter.
But STILL.
That means that your repeat post performs at 62% the level of the first post.
And all you did was change the wording a little.
Next tool: Are you trying too hard on social media?
Here’s a fun free tool to measure if you’re trying to hard, which means you might be annoying, or worse, you look…
… desperate.
I find that people are on one side of the pendulum or the other.
You self-promote too much on social media.
Or, you don’t want to self-promote because it makes you feel cheap and salesy.
We can agree, though, that success on social media for both business and personal is about connecting in an effortless authentic way.
I’ll admit, this tool is in good fun and more relevant to your personal life, but it’s still worth a “look-see” for your business or nonprofit.
Why a “look-see?”
I looked at people who were really good at social media and sure enough, their scores correlated with their success on social media.
Axe Body Spray created a fun tool called Social Effort Scale, to support their “effortless” marketing campaign.
The Social Effort Scale is free and rates your posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to tell you if you are “trying too hard with your social media sharing.”
Warning: You have to be careful about how you log in on your social media accounts to measure your business versus your personal accounts.
I measured both.
Your scores are based largely on the way you format your updates, so you get scored as trying too hard for using too many:
- Hashtags
- Capital letters
- Emoticons
- Exclamation marks
If you’re like me and speak at conferences, you get penalized for having too many hashtags if your audience retweets or tweets during your talk, so I would definitely evaluate the results against what your goals were or are. I love audience tweeting highlights from my presentation.
Here’s the fun part.
The tool allows you to compare yourself to other Twitters users without getting caught comparing yourself to them.
You can click on your categories for Twitter to see what type of posts get rated “effortless” or “trying to hard.”
My Twitter score is great at 92% effortless.
My Facebook score is a downright “walk-of-shame” at 57% trying too hard.
I’m ashamed.
I will do better.
Thanks to Kevan at Buffer for making me aware of this one.
