Travis Dodge
Running your small business’s social media can be cumbersome. Sure, you know how to use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share pictures of your cats (and whatever else strikes your fancy), but it’s a huge jump from personal use to effectively using social media to grow your business. And with so many platforms out there, figuring it all out can seem pretty overwhelming.
Here at LongerDays, social media management is an area where we really shine! We know the different networks, their strengths and weaknesses, and how to help get your posts seen. We also know the best tools to manage multiple platforms – and today, we’re examining two of the most popular.
What Do They Do?
MeetEdgar and Hootsuite are two of the most widely used tools for scheduling and managing social media across multiple platforms. Our team uses them nearly every day!
At the core, they seem pretty similar. After all, you can use both of them to access all your social media networks in one place (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), and push out content from a single platform instead of going to each site or app individually. You can use either tool to schedule posts, but that’s about where the similarities end.
How Are They Different?
MeetEdgar and Hootsuite can both be used to schedule social media content, but they do it in very different ways.
With Hootsuite, you can log in, see all the social media networks you have linked, and post to each of those networks. You can post instantaneously, schedule posts for a certain time, or allow Hootsuite to auto-schedule. Auto-scheduled posts go out at a time determined by Hootsuite algorithms that predict when your post will have the most visibility.
It’s great for getting out information that is very important at the moment, but may not be as relevant tomorrow. For instance, if you’re a carpet cleaning business that suddenly had an appointment open up, you could use Hootsuite to post on all your social media networks simultaneously, quickly getting your message out to fill the appointment.
MeetEdgar has a bit more of a learning curve… It’s not quite so straightforward, but can produce long-term results with an approach that Hootsuite just doesn’t specialize in.
Photo courtesy of Alexander Mills
MeetEdgar can pull content from your website and schedule it to be shared (and re-shared), generally increasing impressions and interaction.
Imagine you are a music festival that wants to share information about the bands scheduled to play. You could post the bios about each band once, but you could miss huge chunks of your audience… With MeetEdgar, you can schedule each one of those bios to post, and then repost at a frequency you determine.
So, for example, people who didn’t see the post the first time may see it a week or two later. Those who missed it during dinner may see it when it posts again during their lunchtime…
This method of “recycling” content means that you can basically fill a “hopper” of approved posts, and MeetEdgar will dole them out gradually – without the need to schedule each and every one.
How Does LongerDays Use Them?
Long story short: it all depends on the needs of the client.
If a client has just a few social media accounts, with specific material that needs to go out instantly, we may suggest Hootsuite. The free version allows up to 3 linked social media networks, and the ability to schedule those posts for the future (although it does not save posts for later viewing and scheduling).
This works perfectly for clients that just need to get a small tidbit of information out to their audiences, and those posting items specific to right now.
If a client has many social media networks to be managed, and plans on having a pretty detailed content schedule, we may suggest MeetEdgar. The service does come with a price tag of $49 per month, but for social media power users, it’s more than worth it. If a paid service isn’t in your budget, we can help you look into other options as well.
MeetEdgar allows for 25 linked social media accounts, and saves everything you add to its library. There is always something to be published! That way, the awesome blog that showcases your year-end report can be seen by as many people as possible – not just exist on Facebook for a few minutes, never to be seen again.
Whatever tool you decide on, know that managing your business’s social media doesn’t have to be quite so overwhelming. These tools make the never-ending task much easier to deal with, and the LongerDays team can help you get the whole process under control!
Want to learn more?
[su_button url=”https://longerdays.com/2018/01/01/take-a-tour-of-our-features/” target=”blank” style=”flat” background=”#2F6690″ size=”10″ center=”yes” radius=”6″]Take a tour of our features![/su_button]