2. To do a job well, you have to use the right tool. Bob Ross knows exactly which brush
makes his trees the happiest. Emily Post would never dream of using the outside fork on her
cornish hen. And Bob Vila knows when to turn on the hammer option of his industrial-
strength drill.
At Argyle Social, we are not particularly good painters, socialites or carpenters. We do,
however, know a lot about social media tools. And social media tools, like hammers and
screwdrivers, are built for particular jobs. However, unlike hammers and screwdrivers, it’s
not always obvious which tools excel at which jobs.
In each section below, we’re going to introduce you to another tool in your social media
toolbelt. We’ll explain what that tool does, what it’s particularly good at, what it isn’t good at,
and what features should come standard.
1 Advanced Post
This is the Swiss Army Knife of social
media tools. It allows you to take a
complex, integrated marketing message
and post it to a large number of social
properties on multiple different social
channels. It allows you to control every possible aspect
of your post: scheduling, campaigns, even setting
Less useful for:
If you like to publish a steady stream of content
throughout the day, this isn’t the tool. This tool is good
at coordinating complex marketing campaigns, but not
good at high-volume, consistent sharing.
custom web analytics parameters for your short links.
But it’s not the fastest or easiest to make a simple, short Under the hood:
post. Make sure that your Advanced Posting tool has:
• Real-time posting and scheduled posting options
Really useful for: • Integrated URL shortening
If you have multi-part, multi-channel social marketing • Support for all of the social networks you care about
message you want to send to Twitter, Facebook, • Integrated campaign tracking
Linkedin, and G+, this tool is for you. It excels at • Web analytics customization options
specifying every detail of your posts, from custom • Post approval workflow
analytics parameters, to campaign tagging, to dates, • The ability to tailor content for different social
times, and authors. properties and social networks

3. 2 Quick Post
If the Advanced Post tool was a Swiss
Army Knife, then Quick Post is a pen
knife: simple, effective, and doesn’t
take up too much space in your
pocket. It provides a dead-simple
interface for quickly publishing content to your social
properties.
Less useful for:
Advanced customization and settings. Do you want to
tweak your analytics parameters? Create five different
versions of a post for different times and accounts? If so,
Quick Post isn’t the right tool.
Under the hood:
Really useful for: Make sure that your Quick Post tool has:
Quick and dirty posting to your social properties. Think • A simple interface that makes posting quick and easy
of the Quick Post as the content bar at the top of • Integration with your engagement console of choice
Twitter.com or the widget embedded in your Argyle • Real-time posting and scheduled posting options
Social Waterfall--it is tightly integrated into your • Integrated URL shortening
engagement console and built for rapid response. No • Support for all of the social networks you care about
fluff, all substance.
Spotlight on Permissions, Workflow, and Notifications
Permissions, workflow, and notifications are three of the most important features in any social media tool. They’re
deeply un-sexy and don’t generate a lot of buzz, but if you’re a business and use social media for marketing, you
should consider these must-haves. So what are they?
User Permissions before. You don’t just need social media tools, you need
What if your business has two brands, each with a collaboration tools. Workflow lets you assign incoming
dedicated community manager? Should Community requests to team members, allow editors to review
Manager A be able to post on behalf of Brand B? drafts, and route social content to the appropriate
Probably not. It’s important that your social tools people inside of your organization.
recognize that every user is different, and control
access to who should see what accordingly. This is one Notifications
of the best ways for your business to prevent a You can’t always be in front of your computer. And
“gettngslizzerd” moment. honestly, your friend is tired of glaring at you every time
you pick up your smartphone at dinner to say “Thanks
Workflow for the RT!” Your social tools need to help you to take a
Community management teams no longer consist of a step back by sending you notifications while you’re
single college intern. They have more staff members, away and allowing you to act on them when you get
more touch points with the rest of the organization, back.
and they field a larger volume of inquiries than ever

4. 3
and clicks.
Smart Scheduler
This tool is the very newest tool in the
community manager’s toolbelt. It
allows you to queue up large volumes
of content and then automatically
posts that content on a schedule
designed to maximize engagement
Less useful for:
The Smart Scheduler is a very specific tool. It’s built for
content curation, posted in a consistent stream
throughout the day. If you want more control over a
post, use a different tool.
Under the hood:
Make sure that your Smart Scheduler has:
Really useful for: • A bookmarklet, allowing you to post directly from
Posting a regular stream of content on your social pages around the internet
properties takes a lot of time and energy. The smart • Highly customizable scheduling options, allowing
scheduler makes the process much simpler by letting you to tailor your post timing to your audience
you set a schedule and queue up a pile of relevant • An ultra-simple posting interface, allowing you to
content all at once that drips out over time. You can queue content quickly
focus your time on customer engagement and • Email notifications when your queue has run dry
strategic thinking while the Smart Scheduler does
the work.
4
RSS Automator
The RSS Automator is one of the most
underused tools in the community Under the hood:
manager’s toolbelt. It’s excellent at its Make sure that your RSS Automator has:
job: taking content from your blog and • The ability to read all common feed formats: RSS 1,
sharing it to your social profiles RSS 2, Atom, etc.
automatically. Just don’t ask it to do • Integration with your Smart Scheduler. You should be
much else. able to assign all new posts to your queue.
• Advanced scheduling options. Posts should be able
Really useful for: to go out immediately, or re-posted days or weeks in
Taking a content feed and auto-sharing to your social the future.
properties.
Sidenote: are you worried that content automation isn’t
Less useful for: a good idea? Fear not. It turns out that RSS content
Doing just about anything else. actually performs every bit as well as content posted by
hand.1

5. Spotlight on Smart Scheduling
Smart Scheduling, the very newest tool in the community manager’s toolbelt, is purpose-built to help community
managers efficiently curate content.
Content curation -- linking to content produced by others -- is highly effective at generating interest and
engagement from your social audience. In fact, accounts that curate at least half of their content get 180% more
engagement than accounts that link to their own content most of the time.2
Curation is a great way to build the early part of the sales funnel. But, as community managers know, it’s also a lot of
work. Finding content that will resonate with your audience, shortening the URL, creating the post in your social
media management system, setting the date and time for posting... And then do that 10-50 times per day.
This is a classic situation of needing a better tool for the job, and that’s exactly what Smart Scheduling tools give you.
With a Smart Scheduler, your workflow gets much more efficient. Start by setting up your schedule. What days of the
week and times of the day is your audience most engaged? How many times do you want to post during those
windows? (Hint: Don’t forget about weekends!3)
After you set up your schedule, simply add content to your posting queue. Find content you like, click “add to queue”,
and the Smart Scheduling tool will publish the post at an appropriate time based on your scheduling settings.
“But won’t this delay my content?”
Many community managers assume that there is a half-life on everything they post, and therefore want to post
everything as quickly as they can. It turns out, that’s just not the case.
It turns out that scheduling posts for later generates just as many clicks as posting that same content immediately.⁴ If you
stop and think about it, this makes sense. Does that top ten list you just shared need to go out immediately, or would
it be just as good in 12 hours? Probably the latter. Most content is not breaking news, so don’t feel the need to shove
it out the door as soon as possible.
With a Smart Scheduler, your time-consuming, erratic posting will transform into an easy, predictable schedule of
quality content and a consistent source of fan growth and clicks.
When to use a Smart Scheduler • Product marketing tied to a product release
• Most content you share every day--blog posts, how- • Tightly integrated multi-channel campaigns
to guides, industry news, etc. • Event promotion
• Customer service inquiry
When NOT to use a Smart Scheduler • Breaking news
• Special limited time offers • Service announcement

6. 5
Multi-Column Engagement
All of the tools to this point have been
purely outbound: they help you Less useful for:
broadcast something to your This tool is tailored for interactions, not broadcasting. If
audience. The Multi-Column your goal is to construct marketing messages and
Engagement tool is different--it’s the organize campaigns, this tool isn’t the right tool.
tool you use to participate in social
conversations. This is also probably the most widely Under the hood:
popular of all of the social media tools on the market. Make sure your multi-column engagement tool has:
• Support for all social channels important to you
Really useful for: • Support for all the major social interaction types
This tool is really good at helping you interact with your (retweet, reply, favorite, comment, like, share, follow,
audience, and the social universe at large. Good ones unfollow, +1, etc.)
provide context to every conversation, helping you • Conversational context (user information,
interact in a meaningful way. conversation history, Klout score and topics, etc.)
• A searchable archive of conversations
Spotlight on the Multi-Column Engagement Tool
Everyone’s familiar with the multi-column engagement tool. TweetDeck has been a fan favorite since 2007, and users
have come to expect this type of interface in whatever platform they’re working with. Almost every major social
media tool incorporates cascading columns of posts somewhere. But they’re not all the same. Consumers can get
away with using TweetDeck, but community managers need more. Your multi-column engagement tool needs to
deliver two things that TweetDeck doesn’t: context and history.
Context Salesforce.com, you should probably have access to
If you’re the community manager for Geico, it’s simply that data when you’re fielding inquiries.
impossible to know every customer personally. It’s even
more impossible to know that Jim totaled his car last History
week when you field his complaint about the Customers will probably remember the conversations
responsiveness of your claims division. Since you can’t they have with you. But you, as a community manager,
be expected to know this information off the top of talk to so many customers and prospects every day that
your head, it’s the job of your social media tools to you can’t possibly remember each distinct
provide it for you. CRM integration is key to providing conversation. Make sure that your multi-column
this context. If your entire customer database lives in engagement tool stores lifetime conversation history so
that you don’t start from scratch with every interaction.

7. You now know your five core tools to post social content. Let’s take a look at some of the
things that you do every day and see how they map to your choice of tools.
Task Best Tool Keep in mind...
Responding to customer service Tool #5: Multi-Column Make sure you have notifications
inquiries Engagement in place so that you see important
inquiries when you’re away from
your desk. And make sure you
have workflow tools so that
messages can be routed to the
person with the answer.
Curating content around the web Tool #3: Smart Scheduler Your smart scheduler most likely has
to drive engagement a “bookmarklet” feature--a link that
you can drag to your browser’s
favorites bar. Use this. It will change
your life.
Product marketing for the new Tool #1: Advanced Post Not everyone will see any given
product launch post. If you really want your
audience to learn about a new
product you’re launching, post
about it multiple times and at
different times of day. Change the
messaging each time to keep things
fresh.
Limited time discounts on Tool #1: Advanced Post Schedule multiple posts at very
particular products specific times. 1-2 posts before the
deal begins, and then posts
throughout the deal duration
alerting your audience that the deal
is coming to a close.

8. Task Best Tool Keep in mind...
Service interruption notice Tool #2: Quick Post Get the word out as quickly as you
can. Don’t get bogged down in
minutia; just let your customers
know the what’s wrong and what
you’re doing about it. Follow up
with status updates frequently.
Breaking industry news Tool #2: Quick Post Don’t over-think it. Timeliness is
more important than clever
messaging when news breaks in
your industry. Get something out to
your audience ASAP.
Sharing your blog posts Tool #4: RSS Automator If your organization has an active
blogging presence, just spend some
time setting up your RSS Automator.
Stop fielding requests from your
bloggers to share their content.
Retweeting interesting stuff Tool #5: Multi-Column If it’s really timely, go ahead and
your followers say Engagement push that retweet button
immediately. But, consider:
Tool #3: Smart Scheduler retweeting is one of the main
sources of content curation. You
should probably add this to your
Smart Scheduler’s queue so that it
can be posted along with the rest
of your amazing content.
Every community manager and every brand has a different set of needs. Consider building
this table for yourself. What do you spend most of your day doing? What tools are best
suited to accomplish those tasks more efficiently and more effectively?
Choosing the right tool for the job can not only make your life easier. It can dramatically
improve your social media marketing performance.

9. Sources:
1. Is Post Automation Effective?
http://argylesocial.com/blog/2011/07/05/is-post-automation-effective.html
2. New Research Finds the Curation vs Creation Sweet Spot
http://argylesocial.com/blog/2011/09/07/new-research-finds-the-curation-vs-creation-
sweet-spot.html
3. Social Timing Insights Infographic
http://argylesocial.com/infographics/social-timing-insights-infographic
4. Is Post Automation Effective?
http://argylesocial.com/blog/2011/07/05/is-post-automation-effective.html