Beth Becker’s latest “Political Social Grab Bag” e-newsletter is out, and you should check out the whole June issue archived right here, an Epolitics.com online exclusive. The Grab Bag is monthly for now, and it’s a hit with social media advocacy and politics crowd. Sign up now to get the next Political Social Grab Bag delivered straight to your inbox.
Besides the intro excerpted below, the full version includes a look at new tools, some excellent reading suggestions, upcoming webinars, the ever-popular “don’t try this at home” section, who’s winning the internet, and more. Take it away, Beth:
What’s New To Think About?
I’ve been thinking a lot about time management. We all know that while I personally specialize in social media, most of you have a zillion other tasks that you need to accomplish daily, with social media being only a small part of your job. So I constantly find myself looking for tools to help better manage social media, thinking about ways to manage the social media work flow in a way that gives it the attention it needs without being a total time-suck.
My most recent adventure in this has been playing with tools for automating social content delivery and, yes, even creation. Sadly, I have to report that other than the usual tools like Hootsuite/TweetDeck/SocialBro/Buffer & that class there’s very little out there that can actually substitute for the human touch social media requires.
It also reminds me that even if we were able to fully automate content creation and delivery…we can’t and shouldn’t ever attempt to automate engagement. And at the end of the day, no matter why we are using social media in our work, without that human engagement social media wouldn’t be the powertool in our organizing toolbox that it is.
So as always, the end all and be all of my life is how do we make the time we spend engaging people on social media worth the human time it takes.
But wait, there’s more! Continue on to the full June edition.