You Ask, I Answer: Social Media Technology Stack?

In today's episode, Heidi asks, what are the major social media tools you use? Gosh, that's a big question. Um I think probably the easiest way to roll all this together would be uh looking at the tools by role because there's so many of them. Um with the understanding that I approach social media a little differently than than most people. It's uh it's a data source for me first, uh, and then secondarily a a platform for communication.

So I think that's an important uh distinction to make. For the data side of things, data science and data sources. Um the big tools there are going to be uh Crowd Tangle from Facebook, which uh is still available if you were grandfathered into the uh accounts, but it's a really rich data source, allows you to download uh large quantities of data from Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. Uh TalkWalker, which is uh monitoring uh tool, but also just a really, really good uh source of data from uh all the major networks, uh blogs, form, uh some stuff on the web, uh really, really powerful, and very generous in the amount of data it can give you. Uh the individual social networks themselves, um, particularly their APIs.

I use the Twitter API a ton, um, and it is again very robust, gives you a lot of data. Um I think I probably pulled uh had to guess probably about you know 11 or 12% of every single Prime Day tweet, which is you know in the hundreds of thousands of tweets from the Twitter API. The G Delt project from Google, uh from the Google News Initiative is a huge, massively huge database of news uh that gives you URLs, uh gives you uh news impact and stuff, uh really terrific, very, very powerful. Not really a great user interface, but it doesn't have to be. It's you get a big query database and you have to uh know how to use it in order to get data out of it.

But if you want a comprehensive list of uh all the news happening in near real time, like in fifteen minute intervals, you can't beat it. Um and then of course for processing all this, I use uh the R programming language and uh R Studio, uh which is uh a moderately friendly user interface but really robust in terms of all the things it can do to help make processing all this data easier. Now on the management side for managing my social media accounts, uh Agora Pulse is my tool of choice there. Um again let's you connect everything, let's use schedule uh stuff in bulk which is very useful. I wrote a lot of custom code to create content um for um for social media uh for publishing in particular.

Um so there's a SQL database that I have that pulls in um news and and blogs and stuff and then scores them based on uh content that I want to be sharing on my accounts and then that spits out files, batch files for Agora Pulse that I can then just load and then once a week refresh top up the accounts and uh then they have a week's worth of content. I did that because I got tired of um spending hours a week uh curating content when really it's a very repetitive task uh that machines can do eighty percent as well, ninety percent as well as a person, but you know it's it's that's more than good enough to trade hours a week for 15 minutes a week. Um all the different messaging apps you know for managing your social media, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, all this stuff. Um and all the native platform apps, particularly on mobile devices, uh 'cause it's just easiest to to do one-offs on those uh on those apps. And then for content creation, uh, there's a whole bunch of stuff there.

I you do use Adobe Creative Cloud, particularly Photoshop, an awful lot. And Adobe Audition, uh, for editing audio. So for things like podcasts, uh, it's it's an invaluable tool. Um I use Tech Smith's Camtasia. I'm in fact using it right now to record these videos, uh, because it's for me, it's just the right balance of powerful and easy to use, right?

Like iMovie, it's too easy to use, not enough features, too inflexible. Adobe Premiere is you know, it's like taking a uh Harrier to the grocery store. You j it's just not not a a good fit uh most of the time. It's absolutely the gold standard for really big video projects, uh, but not for day-to-day stuff. Um so Camtasia is sits right in the middle between those two.

Good enough nonlinear editor, good features, still can get in, get out, and and and get done quickly. Uh TechSmith uh snaggett for screen captures and for making animations, uh particularly GIF animations, is super useful. Uh Ava is an AI tool for generating music, so uh a lot of the intro and outro music in the content I create is machine generated uh because uh it's royalty-free. You never have to pay for it. Um you pay for the membership to Ava, but then you don't have to pay like royalties and things, uh, which is always useful.

Make sure you never get sued. Uh Otter, Otter.ai is uh a transcription service. Again, use it every single day with uh the these posts, take these videos and turn them into um uh uh transcripts and stuff. Uh the Joplin app, which is if you if you're familiar with Evernote, Joplin is an open source version of that, and that is where I keep a lot of my notes, uh, a lot of my uh day-to-day publishing stuff uh gets stored in there, uh a lot of my writing for things like newsletters and and for longer social posts. Uh my uh daily pandemic newsletter I write in Joplin.

And uh finally on the the contents uh side, the levelator app, which is a one-click, yeah, maybe two clicks, um, leveling software that can fix a multitude of audio sins uh when you're doing recordings, so especially for podcasts. Um and then oh I forgot uh StreamYard. We use StreamYard for uh live streaming for the Trust Insights uh live show. And all of these uh tools, they all have to work together in some fashion. Um they all have to be you know support data import, data export, be able to measure things well.

Um for the content creation stuff has to support as many different formats as as you know feasible and reasonable. So there's a lot of tools I've looked at over the years that um don't fit into my workflow. Just because I don't use them doesn't mean they're bad. Um it's just that either they cost too much um or they um they don't work with how I like to work. So I think it's an important distinction.

When you're building your social media technology stack, it's not a question necessarily of you know the best in class software for every given uh job you're trying to do. It is more um making sure it works the way you work. Uh there's there's a lot of tools that are intuitive for some people, not intuitive for others. Um even something as as silly as like when Facebook rolled out its new user interface, you know, a lot of people were like, what in the world is this thing? Uh and understandably so.

It was a major change. Uh the new interface functions more like um uh an a mobile app in a lot of ways. And there's some stuff from you know the old interface that I miss because it fit my workflow better. Um this is not the case in in um in the new one. So when you're deciding about tools for your social media uh technology stack, make sure that they work with how you work, they work with how your team works.

Uh that's another important thing about a lot of the tools I mentioned here. Is uh many of them do support like teams and multiple users, some of them don't. Some of them uh are single user uh things that you like you might have to share a login for and stuff. So know your requirements before you start shopping. Make sure you write them down.

Like it needs to do this, it needs to do this, it would be nice to have. It needs to fit in this budget amount. Um, and that will give you a better sense of what works for you. Regardless of what company you work for, uh there will be some tools that you will just take with you from job to job uh that provide you a lot of power or just fit the way you personally work, and don't leave those behind. Um if you change jobs or change companies, uh don't be afraid to take your stuff with you, even if it's just managing your own personal social media accounts, because some tools just work the way you work.

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