From the Clubhouse: Monitoring Your Tools

So here is a quicker tip from the clubhouse about monitoring your tools. So there I was I vacation the other week. Yes I know I shouldn’t have been checking Facebook but I had a little down time and good cell service so I was checking out my feed. That is when I realized something was wrong. I started realizing that one of my friends on Facebook had suddenly flooded my feed with multiple posts. Now for those of you that remember my initial “From the Clubhouse: Flawed Curation Styles” you are probably thinking that I’m about to talk about the curation style of the over-sharer but not quite. When I looked at the time of this friends post they were all with in a 15 minute period and there was over 120+ posts.. YES 120+ talk about ruining checking on my friends. So the problem was obvious to me in that a tool was going haywire for this friend.

So many people will argue about how we shouldn’t be using tools to cross pollenate and auto feed some social media accounts. I think there is a balance and art to it but I’m not going to get into that conversation here. Instead if you are going to use these type of tools then you need to test, test and monitor those tools.

Alin S via Compfight

Thanks to awesome people all over the internet we have so many tools to select from and more popping up everyday. I am a firm believer in the keep it simple using only a couple of tools even though I may tinker with a lot of them. The one thing I am very aware of is how these tools are interacting with my social sites that they are posting to. So I implement the Test, Test and Monitor method with any automated or trigger based tool.

Test Posting: So the first test is about testing the link to the social sites. Checking to see how a tool posts to different sites is important for you to understand how the posts will look when they post. Does it keep Twitter posts under 140 characters, does the hashtag appear correctly and is it creating the correct links? For Facebook is it posting a link, sharing a link and how does the content look. Look at any site you are posting to and make sure the tool is producing the type of post you are hoping to produce. You have to understand what the tool is taking in for information and how it is posting that information out. Each tool is different so it is important to understand this.

Test Scheduling: So scheduling is a big one for automation and for good reason but you must understand when the tool triggers a share and how much it does share. So first thing to do is a schedule a single post to go out. Set the schedule for 5-15 minutes in the future and grab a cup of coffee. After it triggers check all the places it was going. Did they all recieve the post? Did it post only once? Some tools will post multiple times for each transaction and you need to make sure you watch this. You don’t want the tool to trigger every 3 hours but then flood your stream with 10 posts each time. Understand how the tools triggers and posts. Here’s a helpful tip do both tests at the same time since you have to it anyhow. You can also post to secondary accounts so you are not testing to your main pages.

Monitor: Then after you are satisfied with how the tool works it is on to the final step. Lastly make sure you are monitoring you accounts for your tools behavior. Now this doesn’t mean watching them 24/7 we all know there isn’t time for all of that. So what I do is take a tool like Hootsuite and setup a monitoring tab that lets me at a glance see my own traffic in various social media accounts. Then what I do is take 30 seconds to quickly check the outgoing messages to followers from the various accounts. That way if a see an issue or a concern I can jump on it quickly. Remember every time you change a parameter or start a new trigger make sure you are watching to see if everything is OK. DON”T ASSUME CHECK. Now if you do this you should be OK… Of Course a site could go haywire on you and cause issues but that is the risk you take. At least if you take the 30 seconds to check you can catch and stop any bad behavior immediately. If a tool does do you wrong please take the blame fix the feed and apologize so your followers. Just don’t leave the garbage in your feed, clean it up. Another side benefit of this of monitoring is you can also get a feel to what you are doing since you can see any post you’ve made. Am I over Instagraming or have I been complaining a lot are some of things you may notice.

So with that simple mentality you can effectively set up a new tool and monitor the function all the while keeping your followers safe from the 120+ post mistake.

So to sum up this post with some easy tidbits.

Tools can be good if you know what they are doing, so follow the Test, Test and Monitor method.

1. Before using a tool make sure you Test how the tools posts to all your sites and Test how the scheduling works if applicable.

2. Once a tool is implemented make sure you set up a person monitoring tab that allows you to see your posts to your own social sites. This way you can easily see if everything is working the way it should or fix it if needed. Don’t be a afraid of the mistake just make it right if it happens.

Now you know and knowing is half the battle.

Clubhouse is now open for ice bathing…. Keep it cool out there kiddies!