In 2010, I pivoted my career from being a web & multimedia designer to social media and digital marketing. At the time of this writing, I have 13 years dedicated to social media, which means I’ve gone through many tools and have seen some merge, cease to exist or evolve significantly. On the other hand, some tools have surpassed the “Good Enough” label and offer great value (albeit at a cost).
Talkwalker Social Listening
I’ve blogged about Talkwalker before (links below), but here are why it goes beyond my expectations. Talkwalker does much more than Social Listening. The Channel Analytics feature allows users to plug in owned social media channels and gather detailed and rich analytics called Insights Channels. In addition, you can monitor non-owned accounts (competitors or other divisions) and gather public analytics such as follower numbers, video plays, and engagements; these are called Public Channels. Another powerful feature is the Dashboards; these allow the creation of custom dashboards with widgets and data visualizations of your choosing. You can make these as detailed or as simple as you need. Finally, pair social analytics with Talkwalker’s listening capabilities; you have a robust tool in your social media arsenal. For more “beyond good enough” reasons, Talkwalker has started rolling out AI integrations allowing the tool to pre-analyze engagement peaks and tell you what they are about.
Canva
Love or hate it, Canva is here to stay and has proven itself time and time again as a solid multimedia design by having both image and video capabilities. Others often criticize Canva for being able to tell that a design came from it “that looks very Canva.” Inexperienced designers will churn out designs that look like an offshoot of the first template that came up in a search. Put Canva in the hands of an experienced designer, and you got a powerful combination. I use Canva with Adobe tools to create content faster, like the Roary/Barbie movie poster. Canva’s new AI tools expand its capabilities significantly; these include new text-to-image features and additional video functionalities. Some features not spoken about often enough include presentations and website building. I highly recommend using Canva to build your Instagram “Link In Bio” page. Canva proves time and time again that is more than good enough.
Zapier
Not often spoken of in social media circles, Zapier enables connectivity between tools, services, or platforms that generally don’t talk to each other. As a result, the possibilities of this tool are endless. For example, I use Zapier to send social media posting requests from our job request form to our Monday project management tool. I can also set a chain of events that once a bid is approved, it can send the data to posting tools and notify the client once the post has been scheduled or posted. Some other great uses are:
- Pipe analytics data from your social channels to a spreadsheet
- Automate funnels for lead-generation efforts
- Outreach – A keyword could trigger a DM or message to a user or influencer.
Zapier can do much more than this; it is up to the user and a touch of creativity to make it more than good enough. This tool is one where it’s more up to the user since the tool’s potential is endless. Now that Zapier is integrating with ChatGPT expect a significant boost in its capabilities and possibilities.
Artificial Intelligence is bringing a warp-speed revolution to our digital tool landscape. Expect significant changes to established tools and many others to fall from grace while other newcomers take their place. Come back to this blog for a follow-up in Spring 2024!
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