Social media coverage

I'm also trying to build some social network coverage.

I made accounts in Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Behance, Google + and Linkedin.

I'm figuring out whats the best strategy to share my content and increase traffic into CGTrader.

Recently in an info graph made by CGTrader they discouraged copy/pasting posts, so i guess using sharing buttons is a better choice than copy/pasting.

However this is not as easy as it sounds, image gets cropped when shared and not every social network is linked with each other.

For what i see Facebook and Twitter are the most universal sharing buttons, so its logic to make the original post in some social network like pinterest and then sharing to FB and Twitter, but then! the post would direct the link to the original post in pinterest and not to the actual cgtrader selling page.

I'm still working on this, sharing experiences should be productive :)

Yes agree on the last part, so I hope to also update this topic myself (if I make some progress).

What I basically hope to find is a solution/working method that makes it easy to post a single created article to all owned social network pages with few clicks, and indeed not bounce people to other networks/pages they potentially have no account on and no access to the info anyways.

I'm also planning on setting up Twitter, Instagram etc. but hope to avoid creation of multiple postings/articles on these social media networks own specific mechanisms.

I don't want to sound lazy but just want to spend more time on creating 3D stuff, not managing multiple social media accounts individually (but on other hand still have coverage on all these networks). All this reminds me to this Bill Gates quote, "choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because he will find an east way to do it.

So following question came to mind, are there maybe nifty programs that can collect/manage all these different accounts and automatically convert a created article to its proper formats and post it on all these owned social network pages simultaneously with a few clicks?

Turns out there are indeed some solutions that seems to be able to do this.

Quick search gave me this,
(https://hootsuite.com/) Hootsuit seems most popular.
Next in line is (https://buffer.com/)
Something similar (http://everypost.me/)

Then there are also some really expensive solutions (probably to expensive for most average 3D stock media producers).

Most individual entry level solutions seem to cost around 10$ a month, that would be manageable but it would be nice to have a great free solution wouldn't it?

So I made a search for open source solution and found this (http://socioboard.org/)

Keep you informed on any progress.

iterateCGI, Dendrobyte, great initiative! We will dig into it and give ideas from our end!

Hey Guys,

I've been looking at the information about the Buffer and Hootsuite. First of all, a little comparison between them:
Both of the apps have a free plan:

Buffer has an extremely limited one, although, it will still let you manage a few of the social channels in one go. Buffer is perfectly sufficient, when you're only using Facebook and Twitter. It will also let you connect to the LinkedIn or Google+ (if you have setup a google+ page, it does not support Google+ profile). Their standard paid plan, the “Awesome Plan,” is $10 per month. It lets you connect 10 social profiles and queue up to 100 posts at a time.

Hootsuite free plan hooks up three social profiles (You Can choose from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ Page, Wordpress, Linkedin), gives you basic report access and scheduling. The pro version starts at $10 per month and hooks into 50-100 social accounts, includes some enhanced reports with a monthly limit on reports, and gives you additional security features.

Social media communication is a two-way street, and that means you need to be on the ball not just with posting to your audience, but with responding to comments as well. Social media needs to be social, so any tool you use needs to facilitate being social.

Buffer, unfortunately, doesn’t do a lot in this area. They’re a tool more designed for curating and posting content, not for monitoring feeds. Meanwhile, Hootsuite is much more designed for interaction. You can set up streams of various feeds, showing social mentions, messages, followers, hashtags or even just keywords.

I would also highly recommend joining Facebook or Google+ Communities where you can share your own works, ask for recommendations, tips, or just go with show&Tell. Here's a few of the Facebook Communities :

https://www.facebook.com/groups/342181182593655/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2207257375/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/khusus3d/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/blenderartists/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/3dmodelingandanimation/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/mad3D/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/135917556428784/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/57122079288/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2260502854/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/131642893520051/

Thanks allot Eduardas, great info and thanks for the links.

I can conclude from your review that hoot suite (paid version) is more packet with recommendable features.

Would you also be able to tell something about the open source solution (http://socioboard.org/)?
Can it perform same functions or would it be unsafe to store login data in this kind of open source software?

Thank you all for the feedback!

At first i made an account at Socioboard because i sympathize with open source projects.

I didn't test all its functions because it doesn't support Linkedin, Pinterest and Instagram, also it supports Google + but only for monitoring the posts and community feedback, you cant actually make posts from socioboard.

Also i have to mention this about open source feature, you can download the software and run it from your own server, if you have the knowledge to do this then its ok, but if you use socioboard from their servers then you don't have any access to the code and you don't know whats really happening. The advantages of using open source in this case are not very clear.

Open source is gaining popularity in the last years and may be used only as a marketing strategy. Something similar happens with environmental issues and some firms using this topic only as a marketing approach (search "greenwashing" in wikipedia). I don't know if this is the case but that's what i felt.

I didn't make an account at Hootsuite because they only allowed 3 channels in the free account, im willing to pay the price if it means an increase in sales, but i want to try others first.

I made a free account at Everypost and i have linked my Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Pinterest profile and made a post with success. I failed linking my google account for some reason, but im looking forward in solving this issue. If i can link all my social networks i can say that Everypost satisfies my needs.

Another feature of Everypost is the link shortener, very useful for Twitter. Everypost doesn't support Instagram, apparently the only one that supports Instagram is Hootsuit, i don't know how this functions considering that for posting on instagram you have to use your cellphone.

Everypost focuses on posting and not interacting with the community. I agree with Eduardas that is important to interact with the community to maximize your reach. Tools like Hootsuite are designed for community managers who have multiple clients and need to manage various accounts, in that case is very useful having the option of following feeds and interaction tools that allow you to manage all account in one site without logout/login each time you want to switch. However i have to manage only one account, where im already logged in my computer so whenever i want to interact i can just open the social network in different tabs and dedicate some time interacting directly from there, so i don't consider that to be a problem unless you have to manage community networks of other projects you have.

In an info graph made by CGTrader they discouraged copy/pasting because google indexation would tend to hide these posts. Posting using these tools would result in the same problem?

Hi Dendrobyte,

When posting in the tools, you can easily change the message on a different social channel, so the copy/pasting is surely avoidable. I haven't actually looked at Everypost yet, I will look into it to give you short notice about it.
A lot of those apps/tools for social channels don't support Google+ Profiles - they tend to support Google+ Pages.

Thanks Dendrobyte and Eduardas for this useful information.

So far I can conclude there is no clear cut workflow to effectively manage (in automated fashion) multiple different social network pages. It seems most of it would still be manual work creating different campaigns tailored to the different social network platforms.