Taking care of your social media is one of many attributions that small business owners and entrepreneurs have to think of and deal with. Since it’s a showcase to the world of your project, if you post irregularly and don’t answer in time, the image of your company can suffer. That’s why ideas like SmarterQueue are awesome for professionals that want to focus on the things that they love on their business. Check out our conversation with Claude Schneider, CEO of SmarterQueue, and know more about this helpful tool.
Please present us the history of your company
SmarterQueue is a social media management tool for scheduling. The aim of the tool is to help people manage social media posts, messages, and mentions, keep constant presence, engage with their audience, and promote their website and the goods they are selling, without having to spend a lot of time feeding a machine. Also, to amplify the ROI from their efforts.
I created the product about 5 years ago because I found existing tools like Hootsuite and Buffer weren’t doing what I needed. The core concept in which SmarterQueue excels at is helping you categorize content on a visual calendar, and recycle content. So, you don’t have to sit there and manually schedule every post every time.
Once a piece of content has gone out, rather than your queue running dry and going empty, it will go back into the bottom of the queue and be shared with a different audience at a different time in the future – typically this results in 5-10x more reach.
Over the last few years, the company has grown from me into a team of 15 people around the world, over 3,000 brands and customers using it, and growing in the capabilities we are offering and the reach that we are getting.
Every social media platform has its quirks and particularities. How does an all-in-one tool deal with that?
Sure. One of the areas we excel over other tools is the ability to really let you customize your content for each platform. So, you can have different posting schedules and times for different platforms. You can create one piece of content but customize its text, hashtags, mentions, and links to each platform.
So, rather than creating a post for Instagram and then go again and create another piece for LinkedIn and for Facebook, you create them all at the same time, but you customize Instagram and add all of your hashtags using your save snippets. For Twitter, you can put your mentions of the tweets accounts that you want to reach. For Facebook, you can mention specific pages.
All of those can be done at the same time, so that each platform has a length for post, different content, but you don’t have to do that five times. By customizing the content and having different posting times, it lets you really target each platform individually, but save time in the process of doing it all together.
How can SmarterQueue boost your traffic in the main social media platforms?
The number one way is by recycling content. If you’ve written a blog post that is evergreen (doesn’t get old over time), you want that content to be seen in the future. So, SmarterQueue lets you put that into an evergreen recycling queue or you can tell it to post this again every couple of weeks or months, or every year.
Then, it will get posted, go to the bottom of the queue again and in some time get posted again. We’ve seen customers who do this: they have a queue of maybe 300 posts and it recycles through them all every couple of weeks or months. Every time they get posted, they get more engagement than if it’d been posted once.
Also, it gives more chance of something going viral. It is just a question that the more it gets out there, the more people will see, the more chance it will have to reach a bigger audience – one customer got 200x more likes than usual on the 12th time they recycled a post.
On your website you target savvy marketers, influencers, entrepreneurs, and businesses. What do you see as your main customers?
We’ve got a lot of early traction with solopreneurs: individuals working from home, setting up their own business. They would use social media to build their audience and brand. The time-saving benefits and the reach they get are the reasons why they chose us.
The next big audience we have are brands and small businesses, people who have a brand they need to promote and manage their social media. They find SmarterQueue lets them get better results and have more power over their posting than other tools. For many, it’s much cheaper than hiring an extra person to do the job.
Then, at the top end we also find agencies and social media marketers who have multiple clients. They can connect all of their clients at SmarterQueue and manage all of those. It helps them take on more clients because they don’t have to spend as much time scheduling and finding content for every client.
It’s clear that SmarterQueue can help you with saving time, but you present a case about how it saves money at the same time that boosts traffic and revenue. Can you expand on that?
The most obvious one is the time saving. We’ve asked customers for years and on average they save about 10 hours every week. If you are spending 10 hours of your time doing social media posts, you are not driving business growth, working on your own projects and getting new leads.
Secondly, you could be paying VA or a social media marketer in-house and we found one person got rid of that person, and that saved him 55,000 dollars a year. So, there’s the cost saving of not having to pay for social media management.
Also, you could be spending more on other tools like Sprout Social or HootSuite at a much higher cost. We’ve positioned SmarterQueue at an affordable price.
Finally, because of the recycling and getting more content out and more visibility and engagement, that drives more traffic and more business as well.
Some social media platforms impose a ‘roof’ for their users’ reach and overall performance results. How does SmarterQueue help address this problem?
Firstly, we show you what time you post and when, and let you figure out at what time the post does better than at a different time – that’s available for users to try their own tests and look at different timings.
Also, every time you post a piece of content, you can vary something. You could change the wording of your messaging or choose a different picture. Not only does it mean that every time it is recycled it feels fresh, but it also helps you test different content and see if one performs better than another. We let people try out different variations of their content and optimize and really find out what resonates better with their audience.
This is a practice that viral news sites like Buzzfeed use. They publish the same story everyday for 4 days and test a different title, and at the end of those 4 days they know which title performs best and they keep that as their best performing version.
One other area where we can help people is competitor analysis. We have a great analytics tool, that can analyse anyone’s social profile and you can point it to your competitor’s Facebook page or Twitter account and see what content they are sharing and which one works best for them, including hashtags and people mentioned in tagging.
By looking at that and seeing how those posts perform, you can get ideas without having to guess in trial and error.
To finalize, give us an elevator pitch about how a small e-commerce or website owner should invest on your platform.
The biggest reason is you are busy trying to grow your business and getting traffic to your website and trying to improve what you are doing. Running a business is a full-time job. I know this and it’s the reason I created SmarterQueue myself: I was running a previous start-up doing it all myself and I had no time or budget for social media.
One of the top terms we hear people say is ‘I want a tool to set and forget, something that lets me spend time on my business.’ So if you are a business or website owner, setup in SmarterQueue, fill your queue with your content – you can point it to your blog and import all of your posts, you can re-import your best past social posts, you can point at your website and grab pages and links that matter.
Once the content is in there, you can rest assured that it is going out to your audience, it is filling your social media queue. It will be working for you and then you can focus on your business.
Also, it gives you tools to engage with people, so you can easily find new leads and create new conversations with people that will help you build traffic. Having that social traffic coming in while you are focusing on your business is the biggest thing you need as a business. Other tools will either force you to keep feeding the machine and the queue or be much more time-consuming to configure things the way you want.
We’ve worked with a lot of business owners to add the features they need, and focus on time-saving details. You didn’t come start posting because you wanted to be a social marketer, you came into this because you want to set up a business or a website or sell a product. We’ve taken the pains of social media management away, so you can do what you do best and have this taken care of for you.
Bethenny eats, sleeps, and breathes digital marketing. She helps clients take charge of brand awareness and create lead generation strategies via a number of marketing channels, including email, social media, SEO, and content. When not a marketing superwoman, you can find her playing with her three dogs on her five-acre property, or planting yummy treats in her vegetable garden. (She is also a bit of a Real Housewives junky, #guiltypleasure!)
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