Social Media Teams Are Only As Good As Their Tools.
Aside from all the cameras and other gear our team has, here are the tools we use often to create social content for our clients:
Sprout Social: Content management for all of our clients’ profiles. It saves us a ton of time posting content and managing our communities.
AirTable: We create all of our content calendars in here. It’s a much more collaborative version of a spreadsheet—our old method of calendar creation.
Canva: Makes creating graphics, mockups, storyboarding, and even presentations so much easier.
CapCut: Native editing tools in Instagram and TikTok are kinda clunky, plus it’s hard to reshare content created in each app, so CapCut makes it easy to post 9×16 content across all platforms (YouTube Short, TikTok, IG Reels). This was created by the same company that owns TikTok, so you’ll find all your sounds and templates here.
Google Analytics: Social stats and community are great metrics to track, but ultimately, we want our audiences to take action on our clients’ sites.
Google Tag Manager: This kind of works in tandem with GA above, but we use this to create events and conversions we want to track.
Power Thesaurus: Writing is hard, y’all. It’s nice to have some help with word choice.
Adobe Suite: Not to label this as an overflow catch-all, but if we can’t create or edit with our other tools above, we’ll jump into Adobe Suite for whatever we need.
SparkToro: We use this a good bit in the strategy creation process to develop initial content ideas and get a better idea of what our audience is looking for and engaging with online.
What tools do you use that we don’t have here?
A Meme Strategy Is Not a Good Idea For Your Brand, But…
Meme marketing is a little fishy. Legally, it’s a grey area—you’re technically stealing someone else’s work and passing it off as your own. Which is bad. And illegal.
However, that approach can be really funny, especially if you’re this Indian restaurant in Australia. They’re a little…weird…but their memes have helped this company amass a pretty big following. Here’s a little look into how they did it.
About The Reddit Protest
If you haven’t heard about this yet, here’s the gist: Thousands of subreddits went dark last week in protest against Reddit’s planned changes to its API. The biggest issue most users have is the steep price hike for third-party apps to access the platform, which would effectively kill a ton of them. Users didn’t like that, so they decided not to use the platform for 48 hours, then they continued their holdout even longer into this past weekend. Over 8,000 subreddits went dark as a result—a massive turnout. Surely Reddit will yield to its users, right? Nope. They said they’re sticking with their changes. We’ll see how that works.
To Be The Best…
This is something we’re guilty of not doing enough: keeping up with awards. There’s a lot to learn (and borrow) from the folks who set the bar for social media marketing and content efforts. If you’re curious too, check out the extensive list of winners from last year’s Shorty Awards. Here’s the thing about awards: it’s really easy to go from inspired to disheartened, asking yourself things like, “Well, why couldn’t we do that?” That’s not fair to you, and that kind of thinking only takes your focus away from your goals. Just do you.
Things Happening In The Social Sphere
The Kids Are All Right: 9/10 kids under 12 choose to access content on YouTube versus TikTok. What does that mean? Well, the same study also revealed that parents trust YouTube more than they trust TikTok.
Meta’s worst-kept secret is inching closer to being revealed. Below is a screenshot of what the platform may look like. Upon closer inspection, we also saw a terrible sports take (go sports!!!!!!).
A bipartisan bill was introduced in the Senate today that would hold social media platforms liable for distributing harmful AI-generated content. This is one of the first big steps taken against AI on social, and honestly, with the power of deepfakes, probably not a bad idea.
Hey look, a positive Twitter update! It would be really cool to see other platforms take this approach too and reward the creators that keep their sites sticky.
This is cool: TikTok launched an Agency hub. It’s a good place to start if you’re kicking off TikTok creation for yourself or for your clients.
We recently launched our monthly Social Media Mastermind Group to help solo creators, social teams-of-one, and small business owners better understand the social media lanscape, starting with the available platforms. Want to see the first live session?