Is Your Social Media Dashboard Holding You Back? Here’s What I Found

[00:00:00] Is your current social media dashboard still serving the way you actually post today? In this episode, I'll share how a decade-old tool surprised me with short-form video support better than newer platforms and why you might want to consider switching your social media dashboard as well. So make sure you stay tuned till the very end of this next episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

[00:00:26] Social media, content influencer, marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, TikToking, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing. There's a lot to cover. Whether you're a marketing professional, entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neal on your side.

[00:00:53] Because Neal Schaffer is your digital marketing coach. Hey friends, Neal Schaffer here and welcome to episode number 420 of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast.

[00:01:21] Today, we're going to dive into a topic that a lot of us overlook. The mighty social media dashboard. For some, they call it a social media scheduling tool. For others, it is a social media management tool. But really, the core thing that we use these dashboards for is to schedule content. And I want to ask you, when was the last time you really asked yourself if the tool that you're using is still the best one for what you and your business post today?

[00:01:51] As you might remember, back in the day, I ran a conference called the Social Tools Summit. I've always been keenly invested in marketing technology. And I think back in the day, the emergence of social media dashboards like TweetDeck and Hootsuite, I still remember one of my friends more than a decade ago saying, Oh, now I know how Twitter works because I can see the tweets in TweetDeck and I know how to organize them all.

[00:02:17] So social media dashboards have actually had an impact on how we can better manage social media. But I think these days, the technology is a lot more mature. We've probably gotten used to using whatever tool that we're using. And therein lies the issue is that maybe the times have changed. Our posting habits have changed, but maybe the technology we're using hasn't. And that's what I want to get into.

[00:02:43] So to put it more clearly, back when I first got into social media marketing, most of what I published were links to blog posts, maybe the occasional image. That's what these social media dashboards were originally built for, right? Scheduling links to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn primarily. With some basic visual support added on for Instagram later. But man, a lot in social media has changed since then. In my book, Digital Threads, which I hope you've all read.

[00:03:13] But if not, make sure you go to Amazon or wherever you buy books and check it out. I talk about a concept I created called platform authentic content. It is making content that is made for the platform. Not just content that you want to publish to the platform. Not just copy and paste content with a link hoping to generate traffic from social media. Those days, as you know, are long gone. And, you know, this is a huge reason why link posts often underperform.

[00:03:42] Every platform wants people to stay on their app, not click out. That's why native videos and images will always perform better. They align with the platform's goals. And I will say sometimes text posts, if you get a lot of engagement, and I've had that on LinkedIn and on X, can perform well as well. But that brings me to what I want to talk about today. If you've followed my advice and have moved your strategy toward platform authentic content, especially leveraging short form video, even on platforms like LinkedIn, then you're probably

[00:04:12] facing the same challenge I did. The tool that I was using just wasn't keeping up. Now, before I go any further, some of you may say, Neil, aren't you contradicting the advice you gave? And I forgot the episode number, but I talked about it's time to ditch your social media scheduling tool. Because when you use that tool, you often miss out on platform specific features that the tool doesn't have. For instance, LinkedIn has something called newsletters.

[00:04:40] You've heard me speak about, wow, how that's one of the best types of content you can publish today on LinkedIn. Yet, no social media dashboard supports the publishing of newsletters. You have to do it within LinkedIn. So for me, LinkedIn is my most strategic platform, and that's where I do not use a scheduler. So for instance, I might queue content for LinkedIn in my social media scheduling tool, but I will

[00:05:05] basically manually cut and paste it when I want to schedule it within LinkedIn, if that makes sense. So always that number one social network that is your anchor social network, your most strategic one, you probably don't want to use a social media scheduling tool so that you can take advantage of native features if they exist. So for instance, TikTok, Instagram, being able to tack on trending sound to, or, you know, stickers or other native features that you can't do in a dashboard.

[00:05:34] And I know that the tool that I'm going to introduce you today does allow you to add some of those elements. If you use the push notification system, meaning that you have to copy and paste the post from a mobile notification on your phone and then publish natively, which I do not. So the important thing here is that if you wanted to natively do it on every platform, go for it. It just takes up a lot of time.

[00:06:02] And like I said, for your strategic platform, I recommend you do it. Outside of that, I don't think it's going to be worth the investment of time, but hey, your mileage might vary. But let's get back to the topic. I just wanted to throw that out there so that if you remember that episode, you'll know that I still recommend that you manually schedule for the most important social network for you. So getting back to the challenge that I had with the tool that I was using. Number one, it took forever to upload short form videos.

[00:06:31] Now, I have a process where I will, if you are curious, my short form videos today primarily come from podcast interviews. And I use Opus Pro. Go to neilschafer.com slash Opus. And you can get the best offer, free trial, what have you for that tool. That tool will use AI to analyze my interview and find what it believes are the most engaging snippets of anywhere from 15 seconds to maybe 90 seconds of content.

[00:07:01] I will individually review each one of the top. I go up to the top 10 that it introduces me to. I will take a maximum of five of those because I think, you know, as much as the tool actually delivers 30 different results, you know, I think five per episode is plenty in all honesty. So I'll take the top five. And in each one of those, I'm literally going in and I'm removing filler words. I'm removing pauses. I'm taking out sections.

[00:07:31] I might be adding sections, but it's, it's really, really easy to do. If you use a tool called Descript, also easy to do as well. But then I am downloading the final edited video and then I'm sending it to my video editor who then creates that video or recreates it using more sophisticated tools, adding captions, B-roll, what have you. So the net net, I want to talk about all this is that the final videos are like 50, 100, 200 megabytes.

[00:07:57] So you can imagine that if a platform wasn't built for video upload, it's going to be slow. And I realized that that is exactly what happened here. Interestingly enough, the platform that I was using also said that when I tried to upload anything over 200 megabytes to LinkedIn, it restricted me. It said that LinkedIn will not accept a video over 200 megabytes. Well, I realized that is not the case because the new dashboard that I'm using today actually does that.

[00:08:25] And when I look at the LinkedIn specs, they don't mention that as all. So literally this platform was restricting me and I had to go into CapCut and basically reduce the MPEG-4 version of that to a, a smaller version in order to be able to upload. So that, that was a lot of work, man. And then waiting for the upload, sometimes like on a plane flight with the not so perfect wifi, the videos wouldn't upload. And then I had a caching issue.

[00:08:52] So the caching issue was I was uploading videos and they were disappearing in the queue. I ended up contacting customer support miraculously or magically when I got a response from customer support, they reappeared, but that was really scary. And I realized that once again, if you're using technology that was developed a decade ago, it might not be ideal for, especially for short form video. Going further, it didn't make it clear how to edit thumbnails.

[00:09:22] Now I know it was possible to do, but because it was very difficult to do in that platform, I ended up not doing it. So all these different issues, glitches, inefficiencies got me thinking that the tool that I had once loved, and I'm not going to name names because that's not important, but it was clearly built for another era of content. And it still has things that the tool that I ended up using today does not have, but it set me on a mission.

[00:09:49] And I actually used up one of my Saturdays on a recent weekend to do the research, because when I decided I want to do something and I want to get to greater efficiency, I don't want to wait any longer. I just want to get it done. And for me, just to be able to focus on a weekend day without interruption gave me the ability to do this really, really quickly. So I wanted to find a social media dashboard that was built for today's video first world. Now I ended up going back to an old favorite buffer, believe it or not.

[00:10:16] I hadn't used in over a decade, but when I gave it a second look, I was shocked in a positive way. Not only did it make uploading videos lightning fast, what used to take 15 to 30 seconds was now just one or two, but it gave me more control. Things like being able to easily manually pick the thumbnail for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts, literally showing me on the right-hand side, the full video so I could easily select the thumbnail image. Editing video titles before they post.

[00:10:46] My previous dashboard didn't even give me that option. With YouTube, it gave me the option. But for instance, Facebook also has the option to have a title. And if you don't put a title there, it's just going to use the file name, which in my case wasn't always optimized for SEO, right? So editing video tiles, thumbnails, even customizing how your post appears across platforms. It felt like Buffer had quietly grown up into a tool built for 2025, not 2015.

[00:11:15] Another thing that I really appreciated was when I post a blog article and I want to use an image, instead of the auto-generated preview, Buffer was actually showing me all the images from my post, not just the first two or three that my previous dashboard was showing me. In fact, my previous dashboard, if the image was a WebP image, it often had issues with that as well. So it's a small detail, but for the way I post now, because if I'm going to post a blog post with

[00:11:43] an image, I want to make sure it is a infographic type of image, not just like a stock photo or AI generated image. Those are the ones that get engagement. They are educational in their own and they draw people into the blog post. So here's the thing, all said and done, the whole process now is smoother, less friction, less time, more results. That's what you're aiming for with a tool like this. And I won't even mention that the analytics are a lot easier to read and more actionable. And that's another thing.

[00:12:13] And there's other features in Buffer. They have a whole posting template area. They've really improved in many ways, but I will say there were a lot of other tools that I looked at and maybe, you know, Buffer is not going to be perfect for you. So I want to mention some of these tools because we've seen an emergence of a lot of tools that simply weren't around five years ago. One that I talk about a lot here is a tool called Socialbee, which offers post recycling category based scheduling, which I think is their killer functionality.

[00:12:41] Something that Buffer does not offer. Unfortunately, they have Canva integration, AI writing tools. Metricool has fantastic analytics, a live preview editor, Google ads reporting. They're really good on the analytics. A tool called Publer, P-U-B-L-E-R. And by the way, I'm going to put the links to all these in the show notes that you can click through there. But Publer stands out with AI powered caption generation, a link in bio tool. They have watermarking features. You have Vista Social, another newbie.

[00:13:09] They focus on short form video scheduling and include features like comment management and review response workflows. If you're working with a team. Another really, really cool platform that is very AI centric is a tool called Okoya, O-C-O-Y-A. They include an AI assistant, content templates, scheduling for e-commerce platforms, even a visual creator. Some of the old tools that are still doing well today, Sendable, really good with team

[00:13:35] collaboration, client approval workflows, a CRM style inbox for engagement that I really like as well. Later, well, they were the original LinkedIn bio, right? That was their tool, LinkedIn.bio, visual content calendar and user generated content sourcing, which is another really cool feature that I think they're the only ones who have. You got good old Spout Social, which is really turning to an enterprise grade tool with really powerful analytics, social listening integrations with Salesforce.

[00:14:03] You have Loomly, provides post ideas, approval workflows, audience targeting tips and collaboration tools. Social Pilot, great for agencies, client account grouping, white label reports, bulk schedule, scheduling. A co-schedule is not a pure social media dashboard per se, but it is a scheduling tool that you can use with WordPress as well as your social media. We also have eClincher, a tool that I used many moons ago, offers visual planning, reputation

[00:14:30] management, influencer discovery, and integrations with Canva and Wave.video. Each tool brings something to the table, especially when it comes to AI. Some use it to write better posts. Others help you choose the best time to post based on an AI analysis of your actual data. A few even analyze your engagement patterns to suggest what types of content to make more of. So there's a lot of innovation going on in social media dashboards.

[00:14:58] And I used to say, hey, do a marketing technology audit every three months, every six months. And I think over the past year or two, we've really focused on AI. But maybe if you haven't done it, especially since COVID, it's time to look at your posting patterns and take a new look at some of the dashboards that I mentioned. So what I want you to take away from this episode is really simple. If you're now spending more time posting short form videos like I am than links or static images,

[00:15:26] your old dashboard might be holding you back. It's worth taking a second look. Tools evolve. Your content has evolved. Make sure that your systems, beginning with a social media dashboard, evolve with it. Thank you again for tuning in to another episode of the Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast. If you try one of these dashboards and you find a new favorite, let me know. I'd love to hear what's working for you.

[00:15:51] Hey, next week, I have an amazing episode, an interview with the wonderful Dr. Mary Beth McCabe. And we're going to be talking about mobile marketing, a topic that I don't think I've ever talked about on this podcast. Mary Beth is an absolute authority on the subject. I think you're going to love that. So make sure you hit the subscribe button. And until next time, this is your digital marketing coach, Neil Schaefer, signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach.

[00:16:20] Questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast.neilschafer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes at neilschafer.com to tap into the 400 plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's digital first group coaching membership community. If you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.