Although the last 14 months has proved to be a challenging time for businesses across the globe, social media was an essential communication tool in keeping businesses and audiences connected. In some instances, social media became the main form of communication between a business and its customers. With travel restrictions in place and no live audiences allowed, through social media businesses were able to connect with their audience, by hosting live global launch events through Facebook and Instagram lives. More than ever, social media was used as a key strategy to launch new products, a key source to drive traffic to webinars, podcasts, surveys, virtual training courses, virtual exhibition stands and more. Social media scheduling tools have become critical to plan ahead and create content calendars.
In this blog, we explore the benefits of a social media scheduling tool, why Socialbakers should be the scheduling tool of choice for your business and how it can help B2B marketers boost their social media strategies.
Benefits of a scheduling tool
Benjamin Franklin’s quote, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is often a cliché quote but when it comes to social media, planning your content really is the key to success and growth. One of the many benefits of a social media scheduling tool is that it enables businesses to streamline workflows to allow for greater efficiency and capacity utilization. Users of the tool can reach their desired target audience at the right scheduled times, increasing consistency, and flexibility whilst also saving time in the process. A social media scheduling tool enables B2B marketers to take a strategic approach towards their social media plans based on the reporting functions that these scheduling platforms offer. Scheduling tools eliminate the need to post randomly and enable users to compare what works and what doesn’t.
Checklist for selecting a social media scheduling tool
Prior to selecting our social media scheduling tool, we adhered to a strict checklist to help select the best platform. The tool had to offer the following solutions:
- The ability to schedule posts
- Allowing clients or people internally to review and approve posts
- Providing quick and easy reporting tools
- Listening for mentions of the brand or keywords
- Providing competitive analysis (seeing what competitors are doing)
- Enabling advertising/sponsoring of posts
- Optimize time spent on social media
Scheduling posts is not always a straightforward process. A seemingly simple task can often become complicated based on the functionality and ergonomics of the social media scheduling platform. For example, some platforms do not allow for videos to be scheduled or would only schedule a video if it were of a certain size. Likewise, a key feature we looked for was enabling clients to approve scheduled posts including the video/picture assets used and request for changes if the client was not happy. Giving the client control whilst also being user friendly was key to our decision making.
Importantly, a key feature the platform had to offer was for easier and quicker reporting. Rather than manually counting likes, video views, impressions etc. by using spreadsheets; a social media scheduling platform that could calculate the stats in real time at the touch of a button was essential. One of the many disadvantages of manual reporting is that as soon as the report is completed, the stats are already out of date as the content continues to perform and statistics evolve as more people engage with it. Having the ability to get statistics at any time and regularly was important to enable us to take our social media game to the next level.
Why we signed for Socialbakers
Before deciding to go with Socialbakers we approached more than 12 different platforms including Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, Loomly, Bytraject, Contentstudio, Locowise, Agorapulse, ContentCal, Crowdfire and Sendible. All had their advantages, disadvantages, and unique selling points. However, we believed Socialbakers was the best platform that met our criteria because of its complete all-round package especially in reporting and analytics.
Socialbakers is a platform that enables us to manage multiple social media profiles in one place from publishing and scheduling posts in advance, to tracking analytics across platforms, analyzing what competitors are posting and more. This AI-powered social media and digital marketing suite is one of the best scheduling platforms supported by data insights that helps us to work smarter. Supporting LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and Vkontakte, they offer deep performance analysis and competitive benchmarking. We can compare content performances against ourselves, competitors, along with the wider industry.
Socialbakers offers the following functions:
- Approval workflows
- Social Listening tool
- Detailed data insights with performance metrics
- Ads Benchmarks & Video Benchmarks
- Content calendar and Multi-platform Publishing
- Using AI recommendations, it suggests which content to promote
- Paid content analytics
- Community management
What it lets us do
This platform enables us to analyse our own multichannel performance across organic and paid social media platforms and report the data accordingly to improve. The tool allows us to easily repurpose content based on performance without having to find the visual assets. We can search content from over a year ago by filtering it on date and then likes, reactions, interactions, shares/retweets, video views or best performing posts on the platform, and then reuse the same content with the same visual assets, saving considerable time.
The platform can search and track influencers, compare the performance of organic posts vs paid/sponsored posts against the industry or any country you desire to assess where your company stands in the market. When it comes to publishing new content, it’s easy and intuitive. It offers the opportunity to label posts and assign them to a certain campaign so you can track it when reporting. Any new content published along with the videos and pictures are stored on the platform so that in the future, you never have to go looking for that video or picture that could be saved on a different computer or a colleague’s laptop.
Socialbakers has an impressive configurable cross platform dashboard where we can analyse data from every angle on every platform across multiple campaigns. It allows us to set up specific metrics including the number of interactions, posts, response rate, sponsored content click through rates, sponsored content clicks, sponsored content cost per click and more. The dashboard can also be synced with the client’s Google Analytics to further optimise reporting. We can monitor the performance of live posts as well as the top performing posts in a specified time frame.
The tool has a social listening function using keywords to monitor competitors, brand and market insights. This can be a great way to understand what people are saying about our brand. Additionally, we can respond to messages from other social media platforms all within the tool, reducing the time needed to login to native social media accounts to respond to messages. The tool also features an inspiration section, where we can search for various top performing posts online across different industries that are performing well based on our keyword entry. We can then repost this content and assets with a click of a button. You can also create a collection board with post ideas and get clients or colleagues to vote on whether they like the ideas or not.
Finally, the tool features a paid section, whereby users can access, analyse and compare the performance of paid campaigns. Users can get paid analytics for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Marketers can also sync Google Analytics with the paid analytics section, so all the data is on Socialbakers.
How Socialbakers levelled-up our game
Socialbakers has enabled us to start using reporting data to determine our content direction and decisions. Analytics forms the basis of our strategy, looking at what performed well and the time it was posted which guides us in the right direction in content planning.
We currently use Socialbakers for several clients, but our analysis indicated that videos are still the best form of content on their LinkedIn and Twitter pages. Over a specified period, videos continually brought in the most engagement, likes, shares and comments. In particular, the more honest/raw and less polished the video was that got straight to the point, the better it performed. The trends we analysed through Socialbakers also revealed that catchy and interactive captions with emoji’s and hashtags performed better than long informative captions. Campaigns that worked had engaging visual assets which included images, GIFs, and videos.
The social media scheduling tool also allowed us to analyse the worst performing posts and assess trends thanks to its brilliant dashboard. Our reporting highlighted that repetitive content with the same creative assets, or content with just text and no preview images or thumbnails did not perform as well as the others. Although content can sometimes be unpredictable and varies from one account to another, Socialbakers provided the assurance with impeccable granular data to keep us on the right path to achieve our social media goals for the client. Not all content posted through this platform will be a success.
Socialbakers has empowered us to move away from traditional workflow systems like spreadsheets to a more flexible, efficient, and user-friendly system. Previously we would have duplicated the work by creating content in a spreadsheet and then copy and pasted it into a scheduling tool, but now everything can be done on the platform. Clients can approve social media content at the click of a button, seeing all the visual assets together with the post. Previously, clients would have had to review the text, then click a link that takes them to a separate page to view the video and then go back into the spreadsheet and repeat the process for every post. Now everything is visible in the content calendar and approval takes minutes.
Request a demo today
Socialbakers has been a welcome addition to our company to aid us in effectively managing client’s social media profiles. Social media management can be time consuming, complicated if not managed correctly and become a missed opportunity. It is important to use the right tools to make the most of your social media content to ensure the best return on investment. Please feel free to get in touch via email or telephone and we would be happy to discuss and show you how Socialbakers can improve your social media marketing.
