Choose the Right Social Media Management Tool for Your Business

1. Introduction: You're doing a really good job with social media marketing. You're putting out content regularly over time, maybe your target audience is even starting to engage with it. That's awesome. But now maybe you're thinking to yourself, social media is taking up so much time. I just don't have time in the day to manage it all. If that sounds familiar, you're definitely not alone. My name is Michelle and I've been working with lots of different companies for the past 10 plus years on social media and content marketing and this is something I've heard time and time again. No matter who you are in, what walk of life, if you're trying to do social media manually, it can take up a lot of time in your day. Luckily, there are a lot of great social media management tools out there that can help you get some of that time back. They can bring everything into one interface so that you only have to log into one place and you're not managing everything quite so manually. This class has been designed to help you understand what are some ways that you can start to compare those different management tools and figure out which one is right for you. We have a workbook is we're going to complete as we go on and over the next couple of videos, I'm going to walk you through the rationale that I've used for a lot of the companies that I've worked with over the years to help them figure out which social media management tool is right for them. I hope you find it really helpful and let me know what you think. Let's get started. 2. Getting Started: Audit Your Needs: Before we really get into the middle of the class, I want to talk a little bit about social media strategy because this is really what's behind everything that's going to come next. Social media strategy is something we want to think about when we're doing social media marketing from a business perspective or at the very least when we're promoting a personal brand. This isn't going on your social media profiles and just updating your friends and having conversations, things like that. This is really social media when we have a specific goal in mind or we want to accomplish something like sending people to our website, or getting more sales, or growing brand awareness. I'm going to go through a little bit of social media strategy basics for you right here at the beginning, just so you get an understanding of the types of stuff you want to be thinking about as we go through our workbook for the class and we get to evaluating different social media management tools. I think it's really important to start out with this base level footing of social media management strategy, because it helps you think more big picture about the decisions that you're going to make in investing in a tool that's ultimately going to have a financial repercussion for yourself for your business. With that said, let's get into some social media strategy basics. The first step in our workbook is really putting together the basics of a social media strategy and hopefully you have a lot of this information already at the ready, but on the off chance that you don't, I want you to be able to go through this video and very quickly understand what are the things that we're looking for when you talk about a social media strategy, and what are the types of information you're going to have to need in order to complete this workbook, and ultimately choose the right social media management tool for you. Before getting started, the things that we're going to be talking about are, who is your target audience? What is your current usage of various different social media channels? What are your business and personal goals for those channels? Then one optional item is what are your competitors doing on social media? I find it's really helpful a lot of times to do a competitive audit, you certainly don't need to if you don't have the time. Target audience, this is really who are we talking to? What types of people are you talking to when you post to your businesses Facebook page or put something out on Instagram, and what types of social media do those people use? You might think to yourself that Facebook would be most convenient for you to promote your business, but that might not really be where your audience is, that's really important to know. What types of activity do they enjoy when they are on these platforms? Are they watching a lot of videos? Are they coming there to comment on friends photos? Things like that. Are they looking for entertainment? Are they looking more to learn something educational? What needs do they have? As they're going about their day to day, what really are they struggling with? What do they need help with? This could be everything from on an emotional level like they need to feel accepted into a community, or this could simply be they need to learn about how to use a particular product or service. Current usage is the thing that probably brought you here, what are you doing on social media right now that is taking up all the time? What channels are you active on? How often? What types of activity are you doing there? Are there any other marketing plans that we should take into consideration? I put this question in here because there maybe things coming down the pipeline that you want to be prepared for before you commit into getting into a contract with a particular social media management tool, and make sure that you are ready to do that. Maybe someone else in your team is working on paid advertising, that's definitely something important to know. What are your goals? What are you hoping to achieve? Both on social media and I also would say in general for your business or your personal brand, if that's why you're doing this? This is ultimately how you're going to decide whether the purchase of a social media management tool really makes sense for you. How much you want to spend on it? Does it all make sense for your goals? This is ultimately going to help you reach those goals. Lastly, that competitive audit. What is your competition up to? What can we learn from them about who are audiences and what they're interested in? As well as what are the competition not doing that we should consider doing? Maybe there's some white space out there that we suddenly realize by looking at what they are doing a little more deeply. This is an opportunity for us. Talked a little bit about analytics as we've been going along here and I've just made the assumption that you are familiar with. You are already looking at your social media analytics a little bit. On the off chance that you are not, I wanted to really quickly show you where to find some great data about what's going on on your social media pages. For instance, in front of you here you see Facebook insights. This is really helpful if you toggle over from your page at the top menu here. When you're in page management mode, you can see some great insights about what's going on your page as you see here, there's no data on this. This is just a test page that I use. But what I always like to do is use the export data tool. This way, you can look at specific time periods and you can get into the winds of it a little bit more. Similarly, on Twitter, if you are on your Twitter account, there is a nice drop-down menu that will allow you to see a 28-day summary and a lot of good information about what's going on on your Twitter account. Instagram actually has some analytics as well for those of you that have business pages on Instagram, which means a page that is associated with your Facebook page. You do have to get to those on mobile and the Facebook page Manager app is another really good tool. All of these are free ways to get at analytics without having to even go through this process of choosing the social media management tool, but as you can see, it can be a little bit unwieldy switching between them. With that, you hopefully have some social media management basics together. I'm going to leave you to go check out your workbook and make sure you have all of those things in your mind before we get started with our next steps, and really start talking about choosing our social media management tool. 3. Rank Desired Features: At this point, you should have a really good grasp of some social media strategy basics that you're going to need in order to move forward with actually talking about social media management tools and which one is right for you. You have your target audience, you know which platforms are going to be active on, how many users you're going to have in the program and how many types of posts you're going to be putting out. We're ready to get started. Therefore, it's appropriate at this moment to put a little bit of definition around what our social media management tools are, what are we actually talking about here? So for the purposes of this class, you're going to see me use four tools as examples moving forward. Those are Buffer, Sprout Social, HootSuite, and Agorapulse. I've picked these four because they all have some features in common. They are all pretty good entry-level products for people that are just getting started with social media management tools. There's a range of different price points and add-ons that you can use depending on your particular needs. But these should not be seen as comprehensive. There are, of course, lots of tools out there on the market and your needs might be a little different. You might be really interested in inbound marketing and so you're going to look at something like HubSpot or you might be really interested in Analytics and so you want to look at something like Nuvi. That's awesome if you do, I definitely want to hear about the different tools that you are exploring as we go along. But for our purposes, we are going to talk about these four. Up next I have a really great exercise that I think can help you start to actually compare one tool to another and understand whether they are going to be the right fit for you. So this exercise is all about feature ranking and I encourage you to think big. Put the tools aside for the moment and really think about what are your needs? What are you looking for and do a little bit of a brainstorm around that. Then we're going to start ranking those features to see which one is actually going to be most important for you moving forward. So let's go ahead and look at a quick slide show where I will walk through feature ranking with you. When we're talking about feature prioritization, I have a quick ranking table that I have provided for you in your workbook. Then you can go through and use to really think about what's going to be most important to you, because every single one of these platforms is including a different set of features. That's really going to make the decision about what's going to be the best fit for you. So here's an example of feature ranking that I like to use. These are some real basics about each of these features to help you start thinking about like, is this just flashy or is this really what I'm looking for in a product? These are some basics of the types of features that you're going to be seeing. So being able to run analytics across the different social media platforms, does it have competitive monitoring. Influencer identification is something that I've seen some of these social media management tools starting to roll out. Keyword monitoring. That's a real basic that you're probably going to want. Maybe you have multiple users on your team and you need to be able to control permissions for those different users. So you'll be able to fill out the side on the left here with whichever features you're trying to understand whether they're really important to you. But across the top, these are the basic questions that are going to apply to any of those. So how often will I be using it? Is it going to actually save me time? Will I have time to set up and use it? I put this in here because this is super important. A lot of people know that if they get a certain product, it will actually help them, but then they don't actually have the staffing on their team at that particular moment in time to really take advantage of it. Maybe you're just paying money for something you're not really going to use right now. Ultimately, will it support part my goals.. Can I justify this financially because it's going to support my end business goals. So this is an example of a completed ranking. Once I fill this out, I really like to color code based on the things that are positives and the things that are maybe a little bit less clear or are not a positive. Because I think that gives you a very clear visual picture of which of these are the things I really need to be paying attention to. So you can see in this example, publishing across platforms is really the thing we were doing the most of. It's taking up the most of our time and that's the problem we're really trying to solve. So if we do that, that's going to free up some time for more high-value activity. The set-up with really minimal, we've already basically done it during our free trial period and we're using it daily. As you can see here, that's definitely the biggest one to consider. But maybe up here, analytics across platforms and keyword monitoring or other things we definitely want to make sure we have as well. Influencer identification. It seems like for this example we're not there right at this moment in time. So I hope this was helpful for you. You'll find the ranking exercise in your workbook and let me know how it goes. 4. Understanding Pricing: At this point we're about halfway through the class and you're probably thinking to yourself, when are we actually going to start looking at different social media management tools. I wanted to make sure we spent a little bit of that time at the upfront thinking about those basics of social media strategy, so that before you ever talk to a vendor or start a free trial, you really have an understanding of what it is that you personally are looking for and what's actually going to save you time before we start talking about this next most important thing, which is of course money. Pricing is one of the key differentiators between different social media management tools. It really runs beginning from tools that are free and give you some basic publishing capabilities, things like that, to tools that are going to be a couple of $100 a month to more enterprise products, that of course cost even more than that. It really depends on what features you need, how many users you need, that's really going to vary. In today's class, I wanted to look at a couple of the different models for pricing that some of these tools are using, and then I have a quick exercise for you that you'll find in your workbook that runs through how you can really understand how social media management is impacting your budget in terms of the amount of time that you are really spending on managing it manually and what that might look like if you can save a little bit of that time. With that said, let's get started. We're going to start to talk about how these different social media management tools define their pricing, because it's not always totally easy to understand when you start looking at every single one. It's not always apples to apples. I've got four of the larger social media management tools open here. I'm just going to take a quick look at their pricing pages so that you can see what we're working with. I'm going to start with an agora pulse. This is one of the newer products that's out there on the market, but I've seen it be a really good fit for a lot of people. You can see here, they have a number of different tiers depending on what you want to do within their platform. You'll start to see some similarities between this and other platforms as we go forward, but basically at the lowest tier, you have one user login, you have three profiles, and when we say profiles, that means your Facebook page is a profile, your Twitter account is a profile, your Instagram is a profile. There you go, you have three right there. Then you start to have add on costs if you want to have additional ones, and from there they obviously have a lot of other different features. This is where it's really going to start to differentiate between this and other products. But the important thing we really want to look at for now is simply, they have some pretty clear pricing listed here at these different tiers, and these are the networks that are supported. If you're looking for Snapchat, that's not here, but they've got the basics covered. On Hootsuite, they actually have a free option that gives you a great opportunity to just get in and test out their platform, but these are the paid options that you can choose from. You have $29 a month and it goes upwards from there. Their free option will give you three profiles, but very minimal in terms of any analytics or anything like that. Again, you can see for each of these, you've got a different amount of users, different amount of social profiles. One thing that Hootsuite is using to differentiate themselves is that they are now integrating with things like Facebook adds, so they're trying to build that in as part of their service for their paid plans that you can start doing boosting up your posts. I'm not necessarily recommending that. That's probably a whole class in and of itself. Sprout Social. This is a really great product that's out there. I actually always speak really highly of them, but you can see here they are a little bit more of a premium product. These are their three paid plans and they again are charging at a per user level. Then within that obviously there are also numbers of social profiles that you do get access to. At the low level you have five,10 going up from there, 10 at the next level. One thing that Sprout Social does really have going forward is, that they have really strong analytics products. Keep that in the back of your mind if that's something you're particularly interested in. Then last thing, I wanted to make sure to include buffer in here because buffers is a really good starter product for a lot of people. As you can see, like Hootsuite, they have a free account at the bottom level here where you have no cost. You can add three profiles to it, it's just one user. One thing that they do have a limit on for that is, how many posts you can schedule per social account that you're posting to, but again, it's free, so that might be enough for you. If you want to have 10 posts scheduled at any given time, they don't necessarily have every network included at the bottom level here, but they're definitely covering the basics. As you can see, it obviously goes up from there, but definitely one of the more affordable products out there. Obviously, there's some similarities through there, and you can start to see how these are going to be something you're going to want to compare, as you have your data coming together in terms of what you need in a social media management platform. It's really important to know which social channels you want to be active on. Are you going to be using just the basics, your Facebook, your Instagram? Is LinkedIn important to you? Is Pinterest important to you? You'll note here that none of these actually have an integration with Snapchat, and that's because Snapchat is really not friendly to having any management platforms come onto its API. That's really important to you, you're going to need to start thinking about maybe a more specialty product. We really want to talk about how much you should be spending on a social media management tool. [inaudible] question is, it really depends on you and what your own goals are. Hopefully by this point you have those in your mind. But I do have a good exercise that should work for just about everyone to figure out how we're going to understand, what type of cost makes sense for you. The biggest reason a lot of people want to start using a social media management tool is of course, the time savings. Today we're going to look at how much time you're currently spending on social media, and we're going to translate that into $ so that you get a better understanding of what that lost time is actually costing you. Before we get started, you're going to need this workbook from your class project that you see in front of you. You're also going to need to know a couple of things. You're going to want to know, how many social media channels you're currently using or you claim to be active on, about how many times a day you're posting to those channels, approximately how many in-band messages you receive on those channels on an average week, and approximately how often you are looking at channel analytics and what is the depth of that analytics that you're interested in. Then lastly, this one is a little bit tough for some people to define, but you really want to know how much your time is worth on an hourly basis. This can be as simple as taking your annual salary if you're the person that's doing this work, and dividing it into an hourly basis, or maybe you have someone doing this work that's actually being paid on an hourly rate and you're going to want to have that information in front of you. To get started here, let's hop on into the workbook. You can see here that I've started to populate some information about a potential use case. We have a Facebook page where we are posting five times per week, we're getting some in-band messages per week. Let's adjust this. Let's say that we are getting 20 in-band messages per week, just so you can see how this works. You see here that our community and content time column has gone up when I've adjusted that. I'm making some assumptions when I have populated this column for you, which is that every time you're posting to one of your social channels, that's going to take you about half an hour of time at a minimum. When you just think about the fact that you have to get your assets together, what is the image or the video you're going to use? What is the coffee look like that's going to go into post? Do you have a link? Do you have to code that link so that it shows up right in your Google analytics? At a bare minimum, that's really half an hour of your day right there. Then for in-band messages, I have made the assumption that each of those is going to take at least 15 minutes to address, and obviously you're going to have outliers where one of them is going to turn into a really long in-depth conversation for the person. Another time you might just be giving somebody a like, and that's totally fine. We're just trying to get a general rule of thumb of what that's going to look like. 15 minutes, it's going to interrupt whatever else you're working on, and you're going to have to log into Facebook and look and see what somebody has said, and then figure out how to respond to it, ideally maybe you have some canned responses, but still you're going to have to go, get that and copy it and paste it into the program, there's 15 minutes right there. In our next column here, I've given you some examples of general buckets of types of analytics that you might be doing. For the purposes of this, let's keep this on monthly Deep Dive, which I'm assuming is an aid hour follow on tasks. That's about two hours per week when you look at it at a weekly basis, and then all of a sudden you realize, wow, we have 9.5 hours out of the week that are spent right here just on Facebook. For the purposes of this, I'm assuming we have someone, maybe they're fresh out of college and working on this, they're making 1750 an hour or so. This is not a huge salary, but still even so, $166 a week right there. I know for a lot of you, you probably have someone that's at a much higher experience level that is actually working on this time. That really starts to add up when you look at it like this on an hourly basis. I hope this is helpful for you. Go ahead and fill out the rest of this workbook on your own, and make sure you let me know how it's going as you go along. As always, I am @leblancly. If you want to shoot me a message and ask me any questions about how I've set this workbook up, and then we'll get into the next video. 5. Research Possible Platforms: Publishing Features : So now that you have a good sense of where you want to be with budget for your social media management tool, it's time to really start looking at which tool is going to work for you within that budget and that really comes down to comparing the features. I wanted to do a quick demo for you of a couple of the most popular features across these next couple of classes. We're going to look at Cross-Platform Analytics and Cross-Platform Publishing and that is to say, publishing within one interface across Facebook, Twitter, or whatever other platforms that you may be using on social media and of course, being able to measure the success of that publishing. I am looking at again, Hootsuite, Agorapulse, Buffer, and Sprout Social for the purposes of this class. But if there's something else that you're using, definitely let me know with that, let's get started. All right, so our first publishing tool we're going to look at is the within Buffer, and Buffer is really simple interface if you want to use something just to get all of your publishing into one place. So as you see here, right when you Log in, they have an area called the Queue, which is where all of your posts will live. You can very easily Add in some Copy, Select which accounts you're are sending out to, Add image or video customized for each network if you want to have different text for the different networks, and you can either Add it to the queue, Share now or Post to a specific schedule, and it's as simple as that, that's Buffer. So the next tool I want to look at here is Hootsuite and we're going to test that the publishing interface within Hootsuite , a similar to Spread Social they have a nice compose window here with a drop-down menu where we can Select what accounts we want to send something out. You can Add in your copy here, and they do have a link shortener within the interface, which is really good because that does integrate with their analytics platform. So if you want to track how many people are clicking on your links, I do recommend using that. You can Attach media, including a YouTube video or just Uploading some files and their scheduling does have an auto schedule similar to the Queue feature that we've seen in the other two platforms so far or you can choose a specific time that you want it to go out and you can do similar things like Adding a location at Choosing targets as well. Generally, where those features are available. For instance, with Facebook pages, those aren't going to be available on these platforms and you can see here with Hootsuite, I'm using the free account right now, so I have 30 possible messages that I can schedule and at a particular time within this free interface. One thing Hootsuite does have for people that have a paid platform is you can use their bulk message uploading, which basically allows you to just create a CSV document with all of the posts that you want to do. They have some pretty specific formatting you need to use, but it is pretty helpful if you have a lot of posts that you want to get up at once and that is publishing within Hootsuite. Okay, so the next tool we're going to look at is Sprout Social and their publishing interface that you will enter into has a nice little calendar where you can see everything that's gone out to date over weeks or months and if we want to do a new post, we just start with the Compose button. We have a drop-down menu where we can Select which accounts we want to send something out to. You can easily Add in a little bit of Copy here for your post if you want, you can Add emojis too as well. You have the option to Add in some imagery and one nice thing about Sprout Social is they do actually have the ability to crop and edit your image right within the interface. So that's a nice tool that they offer if you want to make sure that it is cropped. Let's say we're going out on Instagram. They even have stories as a preset option in here and then once you're ready, you can go ahead and decide whether you want to Publish now, Add it to their Queue, which is very similar to Buffer. They have a Queue of auto scheduling. You can schedule manually to a specific time where of course Save as a draft, and that is publishing in Sprout Social. For our last publishing demo, we're going to look at Agorapulse. So here we are in Agorapulse, and we start with this nice orange Publish Button. As you can see, this opens up a window where you can Select your profiles. You have the ability to Create your test post here, of course, we can Add links, video or images, and Upload them, and it does have a nice secondary section on the side here where you can see how this is going to look across the different platforms that you are publishing to. At the bottom, you'll see you do have the ability to Publish now, Add to a queue, once again a feature or of course Schedule, and one thing that Agorapulse has that's kind of nice is if you do have content that, say it's a blog post, you want to make sure it gets out a number of different times it's something kind of evergreen, maybe it's just leading people to a landing page on your website for a campaign. They do have the ability to have something that's going to be republished over time, then you can give labels to your content as well which is kind of nice if you want to track it on that level and as you can see, that is publishing in Agorapulse. 6. Research Possible Platforms: Analytics Features: Up next we're going to talk about analytics a little bit.This is one feature set that I think really starts to set a lot of these different social media management tools apart. That's why I am talking about it here. However, you may find that something else is really much more important to you. Maybe it's about user management permissions. I thoroughly encourage you to go ahead and sign up for free trials of these many of these different tools as you can and really test those things out, if that is more important to you. I'm going to run through some quick demos of analytics on the same platforms that we looked at for publishing, just to give you a sense of what's out there. The first one is Buffer, is is going to be really fast because Buffer actually is just a publishing platform at the free level. They actually don't have analytics for their free level accounts. It's really just about giving you one place to be able to put out your content. You can see all of the posts that you've put out if you just need to keep track of them in one place. However, you're not going to really see analytics on those, but they do have a tool buffer analyzed that supposedly in the works. I don't know, we'll be waiting in and see what happens with that. Then feel free to tweet me at LeBlanc down the line if you end up using it and I'd love to know what it is that it looks like I'm certainly going to be waiting to get that early access. All right, sprout social has a really robust analytics tool set. If for anyone that's interested in analytics, I encourage you to get in and do a free trial of sprout social because they really do have a lot of different reports that I'm not at all going to be able to get into today. But one thing that I think really brings value to having a social media management tool is being able to do cross channel reporting. Today we're going to do a test group report for my demo accounts. These are demo account, I'm not going to really have data in here, but this will give you a good sense of the types of things that you would see. Their group report is really great because you can see things like impressions, engagements, and link clicks collected across all of the profiles that you have associated with this account. You see here Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. Obviously not all of these channels are using exactly the same measurements, but it is great to be able to put them all in one place. Then you can see things like message volume, total messages sent and received. This can be really helpful to get a full scope of what are you actually doing on social media as we did some of those earlier exercises, Did you say to yourself? I have no idea what number of inbound messages I received on my accounts. This will help you out with that for sure. Here's a nice look at basically the stats per profile page. You can see here sprout has some demo accounts in here, where you can see what this looks like. But it'll tell you things very simply like, the percentage of fans and followers increase, messages sent impressions for each of the accounts that you have associated. It's all in one place. Then right, there is a good example of analytics in sprout social. Next, let's take a look at analytics within Hootsuite. Hootsuite at the basic free level has some pretty limited analytics, but these do get really robust as you start going up to the higher paid plans. All we're going to look at today is one of their basic Twitter profile overviews. You can see here, this gives you some basic stats. You can adjust the time period of course. You can see what are your followers? Are you in lists? You can see your follower growth over time. If you are using there link shortener within the publishing, you will be able to see whether people are clicking on your link. That's available even at the free level. If you are at that free level, you get a Facebook page overview as well, where you can see similar high level insights rate within this one interface. That is analytics within Hootsuite. Agorapulse has some nice reporting capabilities as well. Let's take a look at what they have available. You can see here,they have a sample report. Even when you're getting started with your trial and you don't have your own data in here yet, you should be able to see what their analytics look like.You can see here this is set to Twitter, Followers, tweets published, total engagement. They do have a nice awareness score that they gave you based off this factors number of replies. You can see how those things are going up and down over time, of course. Some nice things like if you have mentions of a particular hashtag. You can even see if you have multiple people on your team, they are having their own user accounts within Agorapulse , you can look at those individuals response time to specific messages. This is their social listening tool with different hashtags. That's all within this one. Analytics dashboard gives you some nice insights around best day and time to publish, different types of media to publish, best hashtags to use. If you are using the labels in their publishing interface, this is nice. You can see how those are going in terms of the quantity that they are out of everything that you're putting out. That is pretty nice for a reporting capability. You can look at things as well, like your fans and followers within the same interface. There is analytics within Agorapulse again, I'm certainly don't mean to say that these four platforms are the only ones out there. In fact, there are very many analytics platforms that are just specific to that, that have nothing to do with social publishing. I certainly couldn't get into all of them here. If you have one that you particularly love, you love working with all the time, I highly recommend, tweet it to me at LeBlanc. I'll definitely retweet that out to my followers because, I interface with a lot of people that are in the social media space and they definitely would love to hear about it. Hit me up and I hope you're enjoying this and we'll hope on into the next video. 7. Make The Most of A Trial Period: If there's one phrase you may have heard me use a couple of times over the last couple of videos, it's probably free trial period. Luckily, a lot of the social media management tools out there do offer this as an opportunity for you to really get behind the wheel and test out if this is going to work for you. What I really suggest is, once you've done your ranking of features and you've understood what's going to be most important to you, what your price point is. Pick out two or three of these different social media management tools and set up a free trial period. These tend to range from somewhere around seven days to maybe thirty days. You are going to be somewhat limited in what you can do in that time, but it will give you access to all the different features and you got to get in there and really test them out because that's the only way you're really going to know if this is going to be the right fit for you. I just couldn't recommend it enough because it is really a lot of effort to start using a new software like this and make sure that people on your team are on bordered with it. If that's part of what you're dealing with, you want to make sure it works out. I've got some tips here for you to think about when you're making the most of your trial period. Before you begin, definitely understand what the limitations and requirements of the trial period are. If you have to enter your credit card information, that's really important to know. It's not usually required for a lot of the software, however, there certainly are maybe more enterprise ones where they don't really want to let you do that demo without it. You don't want to get stuck paying for something you're not going to use in the long-term. Also, some of the free trial periods might not give you all of the features that you are looking for. You might have to talk to a rep from the software company to get a demo of those. It's not always great, but it's good to know that going in. You want to find out how cancellation works. Is this going to automatically renew at the end of your trial period and start charging you? Of course, really important to know. You definitely want to consider, what time is it going to take for you to actually set up and implement this? Play in accordingly, in terms of, how many of these trial periods you're willing to test out? Because I know it can be time-intensive simply to connect your social accounts to multiple different management tools. Hopefully at the end of this class, you won't be stuck doing that. You'll have a good idea where you're going already. I definitely would consider setting up some calendar reminders for, when your trial period is going to be complete just so you don't get caught unawares of that one. Day one, here's what I'd recommend. Attach those social accounts, assign user roles if you have multiple people on your team because you're going to want to test those out right away and set up your keyword, monetary or analytics. I am saying you do these things on day one. Because if you really want to test out things like reports, if you want to see if your publishing is working, usually you're not going to be able to get at that level of data until it started being pushed out through the system. You're going to need a little bit of time for that to build up. There might be a little bit of sync time stuck in there. Make sure you do this basically, as soon as you sign up for the free trial, so you don't miss out. Then I've got a handy checklist here for you and you'll find this in your class work book. I highly recommend you do all of these activities if you do go forward with the free trial periods. Make sure you publish post to all of the relevant networks that you're trying to use long-term, as well as use any scheduling functionality just to get a sense of how that works. I highly recommend the first time something is supposed to go out, don't just assume it's running on autopilot, log in that day and check your accounts and make sure that it has actually gone out at the time that you expected it to. Then everything looks right? The images aren't cropping funny or something like that. Test some keyword monitoring even if you have to do something that's really general, just to make sure you get some data set up in there. Test your direct message abilities. Ask a friend to send a direct message to you so you can take a look at that. Make sure you run a test analytics report. After you've done a few of these earlier things, and then if you're going to have user roles, other people that are going to need to log in, maybe you need to prove, post that they have scheduled or have somebody be able to queue things up for you and you're the final push to get them out the door. You want to test those user roles settings and see, is it really difficult for people to understand how that works, or is it super intuitive? That should get you set up for a really good at trial period. If you are moving forward with a trial period with any of the social media management tools that we've talked about here in the class, I'd love to hear about it. Shoot me a tweet and let me know what you've decided and will see you in the next video. 8. Conclusion: Making Your Software Choice: At this point, you should be just about ready to make your decision about which social media management tool is right for you. Maybe you are going to move forward with a couple of trial periods, or maybe you're actually ready to commit to a tool and start using it for your business. Make sure that you use the different exercises we've completed in your workbook to help inform that choice. I highly encourage you to go back and look at that cost calculator and see whether the budget for a paid tool makes sense, because a lot of times it really does ultimately end up saving you that time, and we all know time is money. I encourage you to look back at your feature ranking and make sure anything you move forward with really meets up with the features that you started out looking for, and you're not getting caught up in maybe the flashy interface or something that is going to be less important, ultimately, in the long run. I hope that you have found this class really useful. If you have decided to move forward with a social media management tool, I'd love to hear which one you have chose. Please share with me, I'm on Twitter. You can tweet at me @leblancly. I'd love to share and retweet that for anybody else that's following along as well. Because I think it's always really interesting to see what different people in different industries and different roles are choosing for the right product for them and it can be really helpful for other people that are trying to make that decision as well. I'd like to thank you for learning with me here on Skillshare, and I hope you join me for another class in the future. Thanks.