5 Tools to Organize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Do you feel like drowning in a sea of social media content and channels, struggling to keep your head above water? Feeling overwhelmed by the constant need to curate, share, and organize information?

You’re not alone. Social media is incredibly difficult to organize for businesses. It is overwhelming.

Using the right tools is key.

Most of the tools these days integrate seamlessly with browsers and enable mobile access to your stuff on phones and tablets. Make sure you leverage browser plugins, toolbars, and special bookmarklets (little JavaScript browser links) if provided, which shortstop the drudgery of manually cutting and pasting text and links for storage and social sharing.

I don’t collect or use every available tool, though I admit I must often fight the temptation. For creating an information repository, rely on tools that emphasize speed, or frictionless processing and sharing. If you are a heavy consumer of blog and news site content, you don’t have time for apps to churn and store your social business treasure chest.

1. Buffer: Tweet what you read

Buffer is my favorite tool to fill my stash and dole it out over time. Most importantly, it supports my preferred X/Twitter habit of cherry-picking sound bites from posts, rather than the standard routine of tweeting headlines.

That’s ultimate transparency and a personal branding statement. To wit: I read what I tweet. I also religiously seek out and add bylines for authors. Yes, this is extra work, and Buffer caters to my hyper-collecting passion.

Suggestion to writers: include easy-to-locate X/Twitter handles with every post; don’t make me work so hard to credit you in addition to the person who shared your work.

2. Glasp: Clean Up Your Curation

If you curate content from a variety of sources, it makes sense to check and be sure you’re still using viable sources. Do they continue to compliment your brand and add value? It might be time to prune some content sources and cultivate new ones.

For packing away all of your company’s favorite links, try Glasp, a web app that lets you highlight and save notes and leave your own comments from pages you are reading. Currently, it is free and only supports Google Chrome and Safari browsers.

All your notes and highlights are saved to your Glasp profile page. There you can generate and tweet an AI summary from your notes.

You can make your profile public and let other people track your curated content.

Use Glasp to:

• Curate content for newsletters and blogs (AI summaries make it easy to highlight your favorite parts of content you chose to share)
• Educate your team by sharing summarized resources for them to go over on a regular basis.

3. Organize Your Social Profiles: Beacons

It’s easy for social media profiles to spread like weeds if you’re not careful. Take stock of all the online profiles for your business-to-business brand and make sure your images, messaging, and positioning are up to date.

This is especially important if your business has evolved over the past year (and who hasn’t?) or if you never got around to updating when X/Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook changed their profile image sizes and page layouts.

You need to take a look at your social media profiles and identify which ones you need to prioritize and which ones you don’t need to waste your time on. Tools like Beacons will help consolidate your major accounts to create a streamlined user experience. LinkLab provides a solid guide on what Beacons AI is.

While you are taking inventory of your social account profiles, you may find some that just don’t belong with your brand anymore. Do you have multiple brands, different divisions, or lots of employees involved in social media? Nextiva has a great guide on organizing your marketing communication channels.

If you have accounts that no longer fit your social media strategy – or that were created by past employees – take them down so they don’t dilute your brand.

4. Organize and Share Your Notes: Evernote

For jotting down notes and project ideas, nothing beats a little tool called Evernote. This is an app that exists everywhere: in the cloud, on your PC or Mac, on your phone or tablet, and all in synchronous harmony.

A benefit of Evernote is that it saves full content for offline reading, especially handy for when a site goes down or a link disappears forever. It happens.
Evernote directly shares to Facebook or X/Twitter, or you can create unique Evernote links to your “clips” for email, IM, or posting on any site.

5. Create Your Virtual Backup: Carbonite

If you are already paying for a cloud-based file backup service such as Carbonite, you may not know that you also have instant remote access to every document, photo, music track, and video on your PC or Mac. For me, that’s a 170-gigabyte hoard — and growing. Depending on the mobile device, you will have options to email, print, or view virtually any file format, as well as play music tracks and watch videos.

Links die, domain hosting companies have outages and sites go completely out of business. Plus I often need to share documents, news releases, whitepapers, backgrounders, and other files with friends, clients, news media, and business associates that are too large for email. So I have created my own cloud-based knowledge base.

If you host your own blog or website, you can use the free file transfer utility FileZilla to copy files to folders on the hosting server, and then provide URLs to your contacts. If you are not hosting a site, there are quite a few online storage services with free and paid options, such as Dropbox or iDrive. Concerned about security for your self-hosted shared archive? Password-protect private files, or compress and encrypt files with a utility such as WinZip.

Once your business is free from the weight of all that dust and detritus, you’ll discover much more space for creating social media promotions that really build your brand.

Though I’ve had fun with the theme of digital hoarding, the fact is that the social business world continues to accumulate and share files and links at a mind-boggling rate. While you are consuming and sharing, you can also strategically organize this information so it can be selectively leveraged for tactical business objectives. There’s a lot of power in your hoard. Let’s just keep this our little secret.

Take a week to clean the house, then reward yourself with a few new tools and social media tricks. The fresh perspective you gain will give you momentum, and success smells great!

To sum up

• Buffer: Efficient content curation and sharing.
• Glasp: Ideal for curating content from various sources, Glasp helps you highlight, save notes, and generate AI summaries. It’s useful for newsletters, blogs, and team education.
• Beacon.AI: Consolidate and update your social media profiles to ensure consistent branding and messaging. Identify key platforms and eliminate outdated or irrelevant accounts.
• Evernote: Share your notes to social media channels and with your team.
• Carbonite (or similar cloud services): Back up your data and access it remotely.

When organizing your social media strategy, keep in mind:

• The importance of organization in social media marketing.
• Using tools to streamline content curation, profile management, and file sharing.
• Maintaining a consistent brand image across platforms.
• Creating a secure and accessible knowledge base.
• Continuously evaluating and updating your social media strategy.

About the Author

Ann Smarty is the co-founder of Smarty.Marketing. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also a frequent speaker at Pubcon.