A Social Strategy was released just over a week ago with a minimal amount of features — but just enough to warrant a real estate agent’s attention. There’s potential here.
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A Social Strategy is a website for helping businesses know when and what to publish on social media.
Platforms: Browser-based, mobile-optimized
Ideal for: Any and all agents using social media for sales and branding
Top selling points
- Alerts user to best publishing times
- Includes most trending news/social content
- Ease of use
- Affordable
Top concerns
- Lacking many features common to social media management tools
What you should know
A Social Strategy was released just over a week ago with a minimal amount of features but just enough to warrant a real estate agent‘s attention. There’s potential here.
The service allows agents to link their social accounts and choose which lines of business and interests will resonate most with their audience.
A Social Strategy then uses a calendar connection to notify users when it’s the best time to publish.
The publishing interface provides a running list of the social spheres’ hottest topics, as well as a short list of the most recommended hashtags to help your post effectively merge into the fast-flying social media highway.
In terms of the “how” and “when,” A Social Strategy keeps pace. Sort of.
The publishing times backing the alerts are not actively monitoring the Internet; they’re based on historic social media data. In other words, a free Google search will reveal the same information to the user.
This is an issue because in the spirit of the software, a user would rely on the alerts to tell them when to share content with their audience. But what happens during times of unusual traffic as a result of some public Internet event?
Theoretically, a user could be pretty late to the party.
However, it’s ultimately the “what” that concerns me.
There are some real publishing limitations with this tool, the most glaring of which is the lack of video publishing capability.
Video is critical to any sound social media strategy today, regardless of the industry, and I didn’t even see an “upload video” button.
There isn’t a way to track engagement with this tool, either, so you don’t know what your audience responds to unless you jump on the networks yourself. Like the video tool, I was told a metrics feature was on the way.
I can’t help but assume that the lack of these features is a result of wanting to release the software as soon as possible, or due to a lack of resources. Or both. Or neither. I just know they aren’t there.
There’s nothing in A Social Strategy that would make me recommend a person cancel their Hootsuite, Sprout Social or Falcon account. Lumentus Social is driven by suggesting what to publish.
Like it or not, those are the companies A Social Strategy is competing with.
Those platforms offer the same hashtag recommendations, calendar integrations, time suggestions, as well as suites of tools and marketing features intrinsic to a social media marketing plan that would justify paying for software to manage it.
Granted, those bigger systems cost quite a bit each month — some well over $100.
A Social Strategy starts at $9 per month.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe.
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