Week 14: Tools

I outlined the platforms we would use in the first post of the week.  Those were a blog, Facebook page, YouTube channel, and Twitter feed.  As far as other tools go, I would also want to use an editorial calendar to plan out the content we would develop and post over time, with some wiggle room for responsiveness to whatever is popular or new on the web.  Because our man-power will be initially limited, I would expect to spend an average of about 1-2 hours myself each day (or at least work day) on this stuff and expect about the same from my husband. Whenever we are setting up multiple Facebook posts we might spend more time than on other days.  We each come to the table with different skills.  He has the expertise in our content area, and I have the stronger communications and writing skills.  So I would be the one mostly managing everything and editing and doing a lot of writing, while Chris looked out for important engineering trends and wrote the more complex technical stuff.

I would want to use something like Google Drive, but I don’t really like Google’s actual tools all that much.  For example, I have had a lot of problems with the functionality of their spreadsheets and a lot of times the documents don’t want to open or look different when you “view” compared to download.  If we are doing a lot of things remotely and it doesn’t make sense to just have one computer be our “home base,” I might want to look into something like a sharepoint site or basecamp.  Or we could set up a gmail account and store documents in different archived folders until we grow out of that kind of simplistic system. 

I would definitely want to use some form of scheduling.  At this point I think we’d be ok with just Facebook’s built-in scheduling tools, but we may decide to upgrade to something like a Hootsuite if that plus our editorial calendar are not enough to keep us organized.

I’d definitely use all the analytics I could.  I’d use analytic data on our web site traffic, facebook page, and twitter posts.  I’d see what types of content were most popular on each platform and which types were popular on all the platforms.  I’d test out different things and see what works.  First though, I’d focus on getting our name out there to the right people and building a small cadre of followers whose opinion I felt really represented the opinion of the types of people we are targeting.

The first month would look something like this:

Week 1
M: Post a launch blog, share through FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 2
M: Post a video on Youtube channel, share through blog, FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 3
M: Post a blog, share through FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet

Week 4
M: Post something to FB and Twitter, Set up FB posts for the week
T: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
W: FB post goes, retweet something
Th: FB post goes, comment on a tweet
F: FB post goes, send out an original tweet