3 T’s for social media effectiveness


socialmedia, social


To be successful in social media, there are no set rules. One thing which I have observed amongst the successful social media influencers is their passion and belief in this media. There are many resources on the best practices to communicate and amplify your message. Based on my research, I have categorized them as the 3 T’s – Template, Tools and Time for enabling social media effectiveness. These are the set of best practices and free web apps that can be used for your social media activity.

Template: The post should be structured with all the required social properties, i.e., Hashtag, @ references and Links. Based on my research on the engagement rate of my twitter channel, the tweets with clickable elements have twice engagement rate than the tweets without any references. One caveat, please limit the clickable elements to a maximum of 4 in your social posts. As per statistics, the engagement decreases as we increase the clickable elements to more than 4.

Tools: This is a critical element for your social media effectiveness. There are primarily 3 categories of tools:
Listening Tools: These tools are helpful in curating information. You can organize your feeds using these tools. Some of the tools which can be used:
  • Feedly – for aggregating the RSS feeds
  • Paper.li – For aggregating the twitter feeds
  • Juice.li, an IOS APP from paper.li – suggests the best feeds which can be shared to your network by knowing the preferences of your followers
  • BuzzSumo and Rightrelevance – For search based curated items based on your interest area
  • Google Alerts and Newsletters – Any specific newsletters based on your interest area

Scheduling Tools: Schedule Tools help you to schedule your social posts – Some of the free tools which are used:
  • Buffer: The free edition has a maximum of 10 posting which you can schedule in advance. Supports picture uploads
  • IFTTT/ Zapier: To schedule social posting, thank followers and follow up on mentions

Analytical Tools: These tools will enable you on understanding the adoption and amplification of content. Apart from the analytics provided by the native applications like Twitter, Facebook etc., you can also use this tools for a periodic summary
  • Klout – It features the most engaged social posts
  • Socialbro – It provides a weekly summary on your account status – follower changes, content adoptions etc.

There are other similar tools as well. In case you use any other listening tools, please drop in your suggestions in the comments sections.

Time:  This is also a critical piece as the average life of social posts are less – For example, a tweet has a median lifespan of 18 minutes. We need to run demography analysis on followers to know the good time to post so that our post is read by maximum readers. We can use the native analytical tools like Twitter and Facebook analytics to understand the demography, run engagement analytics and determine the best schedule time. Some of the best practices for tweets:
  • Schedule your post at multiple times during the day in case your demography is distributed across the globe. Please note to change the copy of the content as a repetition of the same content can renege you as a spammer and your accounts can be blocked.
  • Have some time gap in between your tweets so that you are not categorized as a BOT.


These are the 3 T’s. Do let me know your comments on this blog. I look forward to your feedback and suggestions in the comments section.
I curate information on digital media and share it at @twitter and @Pinterest

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