I singled out Argyle Social for this letter because they are so far ahead of everyone else in the social media tracking game. Trying to get by with a free product after using Argyle is the most frustrating thing you can imagine. With that said, there’s still a long way to go for every product I’ve tried.
What I need to streamline my social media workload
I need the ability to put out a tweet or Facebook link one time and have an intelligent system take care of the details.
This will be easier if I use an example. Let’s say I have a piece of content that I consider “evergreen” and I want to periodically push out. I want it to appear 3 times the first day and then less and less over time until it appears just once a month. Something like this…
- Day 1: Â tweet goes out 3 times, each time at least 4 hours apart
- Day 2 & 3: tweet goes out once – but at least 2 hours from any time it went out the previous day
- Day 4: tweet goes once but not within 2 hours of any other scheduled tweet
- Day 6: tweet goes out once within 30 minutes of the time it received the most clicks over the past 6 days
- Week 2: tweet once on the day it did the worst, but 6 to 8 hours later
- Week 3: tweet once during an hour it has never been tweeted in before.
- Month 2: tweet twice. Once before the 15th once after.
- Month 3 and beyond: tweet once within 90 minutes of the time of day it has received the most clicks
In addition to all those calculations, it has to never be on top of previously scheduled tweets. Schedules tweets should never be in the same 10 minute block.
I also want the tweet to be “spinnable”. So instead of me having to dream up 20 different ways to tweet the same thing, I want the system to allow me to pre-load what I want. For example if the generic tweet was, “10 ways to write better twitter headlines” I want to be able to put it in something like this: {10|Ten|Top Ten|Top 10} {ways|tips|ideas} to {write|compose|publish} {better|improved|stronger|more clickable} {twitter headlines|blurbs|tweets}
That way the system will be able to write variations like:
- Top Ten ways to publish improved tweets
- Top 10 ways to compose better twitter headlines
- Top 10 ideas to publish improved tweets
- Top Ten ways to compose more clickable twitter headlines
- 10 ideas to compose better twitter headlines
What I need is just a big bucket to dump content into that magically tweets it out in a smart and sensible way and also learns as it tweets – is that so hard?
Finally I want an email delivered every morning with a wrap up of what happened the previous day that includes what worked, what bombed, segmented by platform and where they are in the life cycle.
What about real time tweeting?
When I click on something and it launches the Argyle bookmarklet I want some visibility into what is scheduled to go in the upcoming hour.
My friend Clint says it best, “software is suppose to make your life easier”. Right now most of the shortening/social media ROI tools are focused on providing value at the very end of the equation – reporting. But if you can save me a couple hours a week, that’s part of the ROI equation also.
I’ve been dreaming of these exact scenarios, Phil. Dead on! Thanks – Hunter
There’s a lot of value in reposting content, but there’s also an art to it. Following your example, what if 6 o 8 hours later on the least clicked day of the week was at 3 am on Friday for the client’s local time? Would it be much better?
I get the value of what you’re proposing. I could see myself using it som, but I would want a lot of control before I let my content become that automated. It comes across as impersonal and robotic, not trying to connect and engage the users.
@Jay I’m fine with posting stuff at 3am, maybe it hits an audience that I was too dense to connect with which is exactly why I want to be sure that it sees such a wide variety of time exposures.
They other part, about it being robotic – it’s just a blog post. If you see it at 3am and tweet at me that it is awesome (or sucks) I’ll see it at 6:30 when I get up and I’ll respond to you, so I don’t agree that it’s impersonal.
Having more control is the end goal, but I’ve always found that setting project goals that are easy to code for means that the project gets to the finish line. Once there we can move on to phase 2.
I see phase 2 having multiple “scenarios” where you could pre-program different type of content to appear more or less depending on what’s needed.
Maybe “best of” stuff is on one schedule and “meh” stuff is on another.
For me it really comes down to doing more work up front so I can sit back and harvest better results later.
Good thoughts as usual, Mr. Buckley.
I agree that this would be a very useful feature to add to our offering. It is actually a sensible extension from our Feeds feature – point a content feed at Argyle, box in some time parameters, tune some settings, choose destinations/campaigns/etc, and we’ll do the rest. (The “rest” being the really, really, really hard part to build, of course!)
There are a handful of (features masquerading as) products trying to help marketers “time” their tweets. Fill a queue and let the “system” figure out the best time to publish. Not sure if this is very useful, but certainly interesting along the same lines as your suggestion.
Having said that, an auto-tweeter-5000 unfortunately didn’t make the Argyle Q1 product development plan. But I think that you’ll be pretty happy with the stuff that did. 🙂
Eric
@Eric – When you guys start in on the code base for the auto-tweeter 5000, make sure you call me, because I was actually too lazy to write down the additional 200 feature requests that all have to do with intelligent scheduling 😉
What about people like me that read EVERY… SINGLE… TWEET in their timeline. Seeing the same post multiple times gets annoying. I realize I’m in the minority here but I can’t be the only one that dislikes seeing reposted content. Is going after the people that miss your tweets worth frusturating your followers that see all of them?
@Les – I think you are in a tiny minority of people that read every tweet. I could be wrong but, I don’t think a maximum of 3 tweets within 24 hours is really overkill.
In looking at a lot of data for tweets and what gets read when, I can tell you that an average tweet that gets sent out on day 1, day 3 and day 5 gets the same amount of clicks each time. In fact, a tweet that gets sent out 3 times in one day gets the most clicks the 1st time, but them gets about 80% as many the other 2 times.
The general rule of thumb is that 10% of your followers see something you tweet – so publishing 3 times means you’re still missing 2/3 of them.
Phil,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. There’s a lot of great nuggets in here that could work their way into Argyle before you know it. Although we occasionally take large leaps forward (like our December release), we tend to be an incremental product organization. It gives our product and use base a chance to feel out the true value in features.
We’ll definitely be taking all these points into consideration as we move forward. I especially see promise in the variable text definitions and daily summary emails.
Keep up the suggestions, they are hugely appreciated.
@covati
@Adam – I know these ideas aren’t for every client, but as a power user they would be a huge help.
As usual, thanks for listening.