The Best Social Media Management System for Publishers

What to look for in a social media management system from Haven Nexus, to Hootsuite, SproutSocial and TweetDeck

As a publisher, you’re publishing multiple pieces of content every day. Most Mequoda publishers are publishing at least three per day. When it comes to managing the social that goes along with each post, we find that most online editors don’t have a system, and are typically scheduling social on the same day each article publishes.

This has to be time consuming, and we sure hope they have back-ups if they ever plan to take vacations, or even a sick day. The trouble with most third party social media management systems is that they require the content to be live before it can be scheduled effectively. Facebook uses OpenGraph to pull in a featured image, title, and description for a Facebook post, and until that post is live, no third-party social media management systems offer a good way to schedule those posts in advance.

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At Mequoda we recommend a long-term social media strategy that we call the 12x12x12. The premise is this:

• For every article you write, write 12 unique Twitter posts, and 2 unique Facebook posts.
• Schedule your Tweets out once per day for the first twelve days.
• And then again once per month, for the next twelve months.
• Schedule your first Facebook (which can double for LinkedIn and G+ posts) on the day the article publishes.
• And schedule the second one six months later.

This is the ultimate long-term content marketing strategy. It makes sure that all of your articles are re-shared in social throughout the year. This has major  SEO benefits and we’ve found that when one of our older blockbuster posts start losing rank, all we have to do is run it through the 12x12x12 again and it brings it back to the top of search listings.

However, it can be challenging with some third-party tools when you, say, change the URL of a post, and need to go back and find all your scheduled posts, which are usually sorted into one big list. We find that the most efficient way to develop a social media strategy is by integrating social into your content management system, and specifically, directly into your posts.

Mequoda’s social media management system: Haven Share

Haven Share is a social media management module that allows you to write an article, optimize it for search, and then schedule social media all on the same page. It has short codes, like {title} and {permalink} that automatically pull in the title, and the link to the post, so that even if you change the name, or the URL on an article, and even if you scheduled out Tweets for the next 12 months — those codes will always pull in the right information. So you never end up with broken links, and your title is always correct.

You can also easily pre-schedule Facebook, LinkedIn and other social posts, which typically require you to wait until the post is live. With Haven Share as an integrated solution, you can see exactly how your post will publish when it goes live. This means if your editorial schedule is two weeks ahead, your social can be scheduled that far ahead as well.

Additionally, Haven Social offers a built-in editorial and social calendar. You can easily see the articles publishing, and the social publishing all in one window. There is a Google Chrome extension so you can share content that isn’t your own, or post questions to engage with your followers. It integrates with bit.ly for link tracking and offers basic UTM code capability so you can more effectively track your traffic from social (because Google Analytics isn’t perfect).

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Other à la carte social media management systems

Unfortunately, there aren’t other social media systems that we know of, that integrate directly into WordPress. Hootsuite is a popular social media scheduling tool that gives you a desktop and mobile app where you can easily share any content on the web. You can also schedule your content far out into the future.

However, when you’re implementing our 12x12x12 social media strategy, for example, good luck if you edit an article and need to find the 12 tweets you scheduled out for the next year to make edits. And if the URL changes, good luck, you’ll have to find them all. TweetDeck and SproutSocial are both worthy tools, and Sprout Social is great for monitoring your brand especially with a big team in social, but they all fail when it comes to easily managing a long-term social strategy for the reasons listed above. You also run into the issue where you can’t schedule social for content on Facebook or LinkedIn until the post is live. That’s not the most effective way to get ahead.

Using Haven Share, we’re able to keep our two-week ahead editorial schedule. We can write a post and easily schedule all the social at the same time, pick the featured image, and no matter if we end up changing the URL later on, the social posts won’t break because it’s built right into Haven and each social post is aligned with an article, the system knows they go together.

Haven Nexus is built with efficiency in mind

Haven Nexus CXMS is a state-of-the-art SaaS content management, content marketing, and content publishing tool—built, owned and maintained by Mequoda—to enable all the functionality that multiplatform publishing businesses need to be successful and profitable.

Unlike retrofitted websites with disparate systems that make customer service and reporting more difficult, Haven Nexus gives you a complete, central database that informs your marketing decisions and helps you maximize the lifetime value of each subscriber. We manage all the infrastructure, so you never have to look under the hood.

We’ve even identified the best partners so you don’t have to research software, email, hosting, and other functions on your own, or take stabs in the dark. When you put your system management into the hands of the industry’s only strategy-centric provider, your organization reaps the benefits of stress-free technology, content-focused implementation and ongoing profitability.

Schedule a 30-minute complimentary consult with Mequoda’s founder Don Nicholas to learn more about Haven Nexus.