The challenge with social media is that it’s easy to lose sight of why you started looking for a social media tool in the first place.
Here are some important questions to answer upfront:
- What do you aim to achieve with your social media marketing efforts?
What are your goals? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive traffic to your site? Generate leads or directly drive sales from your content?
What results do you expect from the time and effort you spend on social media?
All social media tools excel at certain things. And if you’re not sure what your goals are and what you want to achieve, it can be a bit difficult to find the right tool for the job.
- What motivated you to start looking for a new tool?
You likely had a less-than-great experience with your existing tool or workflow, which inspired you to start looking for alternatives. What was that experience? Was there anything that frustrated you? Something you wanted to do but couldn’t?
If you want to end up with the best tool for your team, identifying the main problems that caused you to start looking for a new tool in the first place is a key step in the process.
The goal here is to help you find the right product that will address those problems and enable you to do things you couldn’t do before, regardless of which tool it is.
We’ll go into more detail on this in a bit. - What experience do you want your social team to have with the tool?
Your team will spend a fair amount of time using this product.
And as the public face of your brand, you want to ensure they have the right tool.
Finding one that is intuitive, enjoyable, and easy to use will help them save time on unnecessary tasks, so they can dedicate more time to creating amazing content!
What are your “must-have” features?
3 quick steps to understand which features you need and which you don’t.
Whatever tool you choose, it must help you achieve the goals outlined in the previous sections.
Once you have gained clarity on what you are looking to achieve on social media and what you need from a tool, you will have a solid foundation against which to measure your options once you start comparing tools.
Now, the next step is to determine which features you absolutely need in a social media tool – and which would just be nice to have.
But how can you tell? Here’s one way to look at it:
“Must-have” features: if the tool doesn’t allow us to do X, then we won’t be able to execute our social media marketing strategy and achieve our goals.
“Nice-to-have” features: if Tool X has this, we might be able to use it in our strategy at some point.
If you’re not entirely sure what your “must-have” features are yet, here’s a quick exercise to help you distinguish between them:
Step 1: Write down the 25 most important social media features you think you might need
-What are all the tasks you do day-to-day? What activities do you do every few weeks or months? What kind of capabilities do you need to have? You don’t have to reach exactly 25, just try to write down everything you can imagine.
Here are some important considerations to help you brainstorm:
– What made you start looking for a new tool?
– What social networks do you need to be able to share on? Schedule posts
– Do you need to be able to schedule your posts in advance? Custom publishing times
– How should scheduling work? Do you need to choose your own custom publishing times? Scheduling tool versus “all-in-one” platform
– Are you looking for an impressive scheduling tool or an “all-in-one” social media management platform? Analytics.
– Do you need analytics? What metrics do you need to track? How in-depth should your reports be? Paid social campaigns.
– Do you need the ability to manage paid social campaigns? (FB Ads, Twitter Ads, etc.) Engagement
– Do you need to be able to engage, interact, and respond to incoming social conversations? Social listening
– Do you need social listening/brand monitoring capabilities? You need to be able to add team members, review posts, and manage your team’s workflow. UTMs
– Do you need the ability to set UTM parameters per channel? Or a per-post basis? Integrations.
– Are there any other tools you need to integrate with?
Step 2: Review the list and circle the top 5 features
Now that you’ve written down all the things you think you might need in a tool, review your list and circle the top 5.
As you go through the list, ask yourself: What are the 5 most important activities? What are the capabilities I absolutely cannot do without? What is absolutely essential?
Step 3: Use these two lists to evaluate potential tools
At this point, you have two lists. The 5 items you circled are your “must-haves” and the other 20 are your “nice-to-haves.”
When you begin evaluating tools in the next section, you can use your “must-have” list as criteria to eliminate tools that won’t be right for you.
This will save you a lot of time and help you narrow down your options to a list of potential tools.
