The Evolution of Social Media Dashboards

Neal Schaffer: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged practical advice on how to leverage social media for your business. Now the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book, maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody, Neal Schaffer here, I hope you're having a great day, wherever you are in the world. You know, last podcast, we had an interview with Ian Cleary where he talked about social media tools, I'm actually working on a blog post comparing lesser known social media dashboards and why you may want to consider them for social media marketers, we become very attached to our dashboard. When it becomes an app like a Google Mail or an Outlook or a Microsoft Word or PowerPoint or Excel, it becomes something that we use on a daily basis, we use it as if it was our email clients. And therefore, it's really important not only to find the one that you feel most comfortable with, both in terms of functionality as well as user interface, but also over time, the way that your company or you use social media, the way that social media evolves. And the evolution of social media dashboards means that I believe just as you should be auditing your social media on a regular basis, it almost makes sense every few months or so to take a step back. And look what else is out there. In the world of social media dashboards, I think it's really helpful because as you know, if you spend an hour a day on a dashboard, whether it's a HootSuite or what have you, and there's something out there that can save you 10% of your time, you've just saved yourself or found two more new hours a month that you can use for something else. So I'm all about efficiency, and productivity and social media. And it's the only thing that keeps me as well as many social media marketers saying. So let me just give you a personal introduction about my own evolution of using Twitter, you know, social media dashboards, this is actually sort of a preview of my upcoming book, maximize your social, which is finally available for preorder on Amazon, it's going to be released by wildly on September 30. But obviously, I'm not trying to pitch the book to you. It's really about finding the right social media dashboard. And it begins with Twitter, because if you're not using Twitter heavily, it doesn't matter. You manage LinkedIn, or LinkedIn, you manage Facebook and Facebook you can get by and there's some great Facebook groups like Post Planner content, which I recommend as well. And that was one that Ian clearly mentioned in our last podcast, which I hope he listened to as well. But Twitter is the one where just if you wanted to manage two different accounts, at the same time, you know how much of a hassle it is. And therefore, if you use Twitter actively, and if you're using it on behalf of your business, as well as yourself, you have two accounts, you need to be on a social media dashboard. So I started from twitter.com. And I joined Twitter like November of 2008. And at the time Tweet Deck was the big thing. Now Tweet Deck looks cool, right? That black background and you know, it beeps every time you get a new app mention or something new in the timeline. But if you're an active Twitter user, like I am, that thing was deep and left and right. I couldn't handle it. But there was another sort of list functionality. I think it was even before Twitter had Twitter lists, all of my accounts weren't showing up. And I say, you know, if I'm going to be using a dashboard like this, the data has to be accurate. So I moved away from TweetDeck. Another thing that I realized about TweetDeck is now it runs on browsers. But in the old days, it only ran on Adobe AIR. And if it only runs on Adobe AIR, I noticed that I would tweet out in Japanese once in a while. And I got these people say, Neil, why did you send out a blank tweet and I'd asked what Twitter app you're using. And they were all using TweetDeck. So there was an issue with international language display, which for me, it's critical. I don't tweet that often in Japanese. But obviously because I do business there and I speak the language. It's important to me so I moved on to Hootsuite like everybody else, and HootSuite is a great tool. I am still a subscriber to Hootsuite. I still evangelize for them. They're good for whether you're a solo user, whether you're a small business or whether you're an enterprise, they have you covered and by far, they're the most integrated dashboard out there with any single app, you know, whether it's Instagram or CRM tools or email marketing tools, they are there. So HootSuite is obviously very powerful. But I was having a problem with Hootsuite. The problem I was having with Hootsuite was I get a lot of app mentions a day. And you go through your app mentions column and your direct message column. And you know, they have things where you can filter by Klout score and sword and what have you. But the problem is that I kept forgetting what I already replied to. And as I mentioned that once you become more and more active in social your social stream and in terms of app mentions or direct messages, it becomes an inbox right? It becomes like an email inbox and HootSuite lock that feature. And it was at that time where I found out about something called Sprout Social. So like I said, I'm still HootSuite member and I still use it for certain things. But I moved the majority of my tweeting over to Sprout Social really loved their platform, just a great user interface, easy to use. And I had the ability to archive my tweets. I'm still a Sproutsocial user, but the way that you archive is sort of slow. It's a great feature and like I said, I still use it but you know I'm thinking Is there a more efficient way of using a social media dashboard out there and lo and behold, in comes market me sweet now a little disclaimer market me sweets founder and CEO, Tammy Convento is actually a blogger at windmill networking. But it was really about the same time that she asked about blogging that I was already looking into their tool because I was having some issues with Sprout Social, there's no need to go into details. A very, very heavy user, I think for the average user, you're not going to run into any problems. And like I said, I'm still a paid subscriber to Sprout Social. So I love their technology, like I love HootSuite. But now I'm also a paid subscriber to market me sweet and market me sweet goes one above Sprout Social, and that allows me to very, very quickly through what they call smart inboxes once have literally hovered over a app mention it will eliminate it and basically archive it on my behalf. The next time I refresh the screen. Or if I wait long enough, it'll refresh automatically. So that's a really, really cool killer time saver functionality. The other real cool timesaver functionality they have is the ability, and I work with a community manager for women on networking. And there are different types of tweets that I need to respond to, or that I'd like my community manager to respond to. And the ability to sort of segment those different tasks by using different colored flags is a system that marketing suite has I think is killer as well. And marketing suite actually has a whole host of other functionality. And so that's HootSuite, and so does Sprout Social, for that matter. So you know, as I'm talking about where I am right now with my dashboard, and if you haven't tried TweetDeck, Hootsuite Sprout Social marketing suite, you owe yourself a bare minimum of checking them out during the free trials and seeing what you may be missing out on. There's a number of different apps that I am in very, very early stages of analyzing and I'm not gonna have time for this podcast. But I wanted to just give you the names of those apps that I think are interesting that you're going to see me blogging about in the future as I do my own audit to see hey, what else is out there. So there's something called viral heat. Viral heat starts at 999 a month, although they do have an excuse me, they have a free account, viral heat.com. The CW dashboard lets you do emails and text messages. So it's almost like social email really meant more for internet marketers perhaps. And CW dashboard.com starts at $99 a month, you know, marketing suite is a paid app Sprout Social is a paid app, I have no problem if you're trying to generate six figures of income from your marketing program, and you don't want to pay 999 or even 9999 99 a month. And if it saves you a few hours a month, or even one hour a month, I'm assuming that you price yourself at least $100 an hour, even if you're at $50 an hour, $25 an hour if it saves you two, four hours a month, it's worth it right. So that's the CW dashboard. We also have media funnel.com media funnel is starting at 595. They also have a 2995 a month as well as an enterprise plan. We have sendible.com sen di Bl E starts at 3999 a month, then a 6999 and a 499. We have Argyros social, which is probably the most expensive of these, which is at $200 a month. But this has more marketing automation really more than just a pure social media dashboard. We have social Modus SOCl, mot us.com, which is $15 a month. And then we have Raven tools.com. Now Raven Tools Raven was originally sort of like an internet marketing type of application that have now added social media functionality to them. And then we have the final one will be bottle nose.com has its own sort of secret weapon and you'll have to look at their dashboards, check out what it is, if you don't want to write all these down, you can go to windmill networking.com. On the very top, there's a menu where it says social media tools and apps. And if you press that, you'll be able to click right through to all these different apps. But I just wanted to give you a preview as to what I'm looking at and giving you sort of the quick preview before everybody else gets it sort of our secrets that if you haven't heard of these apps, check them out before I write the blog post on him. So that's it for another edition of social business unplugged. I look forward to speaking with you next week. Make it a great day. Bye bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast and would be honored by your ratings and comments on iTunes. Please feel free to spread the word about this podcast and if you would like to appear on this podcast or have content that you would like covered please contact Neal Schaffer Neal at windmill networking.com Also please subscribe to the windmill networking blog on social media strategy at www. Windmill networking.com Thanks again and make it a great day.