My Two-step Social Media Starter Plan

This guest post is by Eric Binnion of Art of Blog.

You can’t deny the power of social media. But, if you’re anything like me, then you also realize that effectively running social media accounts can take up tons of your time.

That is, if you let it. I’d like to show you my streamlined, two-step process of curating great content, posting throughout the day, and keeping in touch with the different accounts I manage.

Step 1. Who else wants to know where to find great content?

After I took over several Twitter accounts earlier this year, I quickly realized that to get interaction on Twitter I needed to do one of two things:

1. Be interesting.
2. Share great/interesting content (this is called curating).

For me, I knew that it would be easier to find and share great content than it would be to stay entertaining. Being interesting is a lot of work!

When I first decided to go this route, I followed a lot of people on Twitter and then reposted the same links they had (usually without giving them a mention or anything). Yes, horrible I know. But I wanted to make myself look like the authority, right? And I’m sure I’m not the only one of us here who ever did that…

This seemed very inauthentic to me, though. So, I was very excited when I heard of a tool called Prismatic. Prismatic is a free service that will deliver content to you based on the interests that you select. Below is a screenshot of the interest selection process in Prismatic.

Pretty simple, right? After you go through the interest selection process, you are presented with a feed that has tons of content in it! Your Prismatic homepage feed will reflect a mixture of all of your interests. But, if you’re like me, and you post on several blogs with different topics, you may want to narrow down to different topics. You can do that by clicking the More link by Home in the sidebar, as you can see in this image.

Once you’ve got your feed all set up, you just need to find a good way to automate the posting.

Step 2. One social posting tool to rule them all

Okay, so that headline is a bit ambitious. But I truly love Buffer, a web app that allows you to drip-feed content to your social accounts over time. With this tool, I am able to go through my Prismatic feed, find great content, click one button in Chrome or Firefox, and then it’s scheduled to go out to my social media followers!

Buffer also includes analytics that let you see how many times a link of yours was clicked, the estimated reach, and the number of mentions and retweets it got. These are fairly simple analytics, but they allow you go back through your tweets and see what resonates with your audience.

Buffer also helps you build relationships on Twitter by prompting you to follow and/or thank those that retweet your tweets.

Social media made simple

This may not be the best way to manage social media. As my professors say about our programs, “there are always 1,000,000 solutions. Find the best one for you.” This is a good method to use for those that do not have much time to devote to their social media.

Combining Prismatic with Buffer will allow you to curate great content and build relationships with those who follow you. As you build up your reputation for recommending great content, you can then more successfully promote your own content.

Which tools do use to manage and build your social media presence? Share them with us in the comments.

This guest post is written by Eric Binnion of Art of Blog. He loves blogging, programming, and playing with his crazy son.