Hi guys, Think this might actually be my first ever thread here. Not sure. Either way, I’m going to use this momentous occasion to discuss social media management. This won’t be news to some, but if anyone hasn’t considered it before then I suppose now is as good a time as any. Problem In the arts, digital technology has lowered the barriers to entry across the board and ushered in an era of DIY. As an artist, you no longer need a chain of corporate middlemen to help develop, produce, distribute and market your work; all you really need is a computer and an internet connection. DIY is good, but it also means all those jobs that would once have been carried out by relatively well-paid, experienced and specialised professionals, you now need to do yourself. To this end, for marketing, you may have a Facebook page, or a Twitter profile, or — like me — you may publish ‘poetry’ cleverly disguised as tiresome drivel to Instagram. Well, the issue is that managing multiple platforms can be labour intensive and time consuming, leaving you less time to write. Solution It might interest you to consider a social media dashboard to manage all of these web properties in one place. The dashboard will integrate with your social media accounts and, depending on the dashboard platform you choose, will provide various benefits: A calendar/publishing interface. Schedule your posts in advance across a range of social networks. E.g, I had a rare spare 20 minutes this AM so I scheduled all my posts for the next week — job done. An engagement interface. See all your likes, shares, and mentions etc, and reply directly to comments across social networks from within the dashboard. A social listening interface. Follow hashtags and other activity, collating and interacting with all of this content from within a central repository. A mobile app. Keep on top of things whilst on the move. Expanded functionality through plug-ins. Create interactive polls, quizzes, and surveys. Initiate AI-led suppression of spam and negative comments. Monitor reviews across different sites. There’s a whole world of expansion plug-ins to suit your needs. The dashboard I use is Hootsuite, which offers a free baseline plan with sufficient functionality for my current needs. The downside is that you don't get the analytics interface on the free plan, so you can't drill down as much as you might like to discover engagement trends, but it's not too bad considering it's free. I’m not affiliated with the company, I suggest it because it’s the one I have most experience with. There are at least five to ten strong alternatives to Hootsuite offering free plans that you might consider. Buffer is also highly regarded, though a quick Google for ‘alternatives to Hootsuite’ will sort you out proper. Best wishes!
