The Social Tool Kit
- By
- April 24, 2020
- Social
Social media management is not for the faint of heart. With multiple platforms to plan for, a multitude of content types to consider, and overall campaign effectiveness to track, it’s enough to drive any team to the brink. That’s where the tools of the trade come in. We use some of the best tools in the biz to help us transform ideas into action and deliver the very best for our clients.
HeyOrca!
Honestly, we could write a love letter to HeyOrca. (We’re not kidding! You should see the one we wrote to Slack.)
HeyOrca is a social media calendar and a content creation and management tool for digital agencies. You are able to easily create posts across all social media platforms, add photos/videos, write your caption, and schedule your posts within minutes.
Clients love it, too. One part that really stood out to us was that clients are able to go into their calendar and view all of the posts that are awaiting approval. From there they can either press “approve” or “needs revision” and leave a comment with what they want to change. No back-and-forth emails, everything is done in the platform.
Another feature we love is the content library. If you see an article you want to include in your calendar and you don’t know where it would fit in, or if you’re like us and don’t want your calendar to look messy with all of the photos that you’re dumping in, this is the perfect place for you! It allows you to build out content that can be tucked away until you’re ready to use it.
Lastly, we couldn’t be happier with their customer support. When we were first learning the tips and tricks of HeyOrca, a representative was extremely easy to get a hold of in a live chat and they would answer our questions in minutes, again, right there in the platform. We don’t know about y’all, but in our experience getting to talk to a real human when you need help (especially right now) has become difficult, so this was a huge plus!
There are so many cool features about this platform, we can talk about it all day.
UNUM
UNUM is our favorite tool for planning posts and laying out images for our Instagram visions. It is designed to be a visual tool for storytelling. Simply take your edited images and upload them to the app that can be used on your phone, tablet, or desktop. You can then organize and arrange images to find that perfect balance. If you need to share the beautiful grid you just created with your team/clients, you can easily copy the link and send it to them for review.
If you have multiple members on your team working on the same project, you are able to invite collaborators so they can view or make changes if needed.
UNUM is also connected to your social accounts so you are able to see what you have already posted on Instagram to make sure everything matches up the way you want it to. Making custom Instagram stories on the app is very simple and straightforward. The templates for the stories are all stunningly designed, easy to use, and are perfect for any occasion.
No we are not sponsored by UNUM, but honestly, we should be.
OCTOBOARD
We are obsessed with Octoboard. Obsessed. Yes, there are more analytics platforms out there than we can count, and all of them do relatively the same things and have similar limitations. When it came time to choose our analytics and reporting platform, Octoboard came out on top because of a few key things.
We value transparency, and Octoboard gives us the ability to have our clients actively engaged with their information, if they choose to be. Nothing is hidden behind a curtain – all the data is fully transparent.
Another key selling point was the ability to monitor at least some of the data from Instagram. While the Instagram analytics are still in Beta, it’s hugely helpful in being able to paint a full picture of what’s happening across all the social platforms that our clients utilize.
The last thing we consider to be a huge benefit of using Octoboard is the ability to build reports that are separate from the dashboards. The ability to build many different reports according to our needs is a huge advantage as it allows us to look at only the information that is critical and necessary to our efforts and speaks to our clients’ goals.
Overall, the tools we’ve highlighted here, and so many others that are in use by the team daily, are critical to the success of our clients’ campaigns and keep us sane while we manage the many moving parts. Social media management is made or broken by the ability to utilize platforms in the best possible ways so that the efforts, creativity, and time put into every aspect of the campaigns is seamless, effective, and measurable.
