As a marketing consultant, I hardly have enough time to write enough quality blog posts and engage with people online. I spend most of my time on offline work - closing deals, strategising my business and my client’s social media approach, preparing content, etc.

I’m sure majority of small businesses face the same problem too. There is simply not enough time (and resources) to do these things:

1. Read from diverse sources regularly. Most of us read from 3 to 5 sources habitually
2. Write copies when posting share-worthy content (if we even find time to post at all)
3. Find the best times to post and consider what time to post EVERY time
4. Put together a useful set of statistics to see how each post performs

So for the past 2 weeks, here’s what I tried: Beatrix, an advanced social media assistant. And I’m going to share with you how it has turned out for me.
Note: This is NOT an affiliated post.

(Accurate as of 17th April 2014) Kindly note that Beatrix has made a crucial update: Read here.

Beatrix helped me do a couple of things with great ease:

1. Plan weeks and weeks of (non-branded) social media content in minutes.

 

2. Create a list of post-worthy content for you to vet and consider if they should be posted.

 

3. Send you an email regularly to update you of the automatically queued posts.

 

4. Think you can write a better post? Aside from using the headline, you can also edit the queued post easily. After all, social media involves mainly engagement to earn trust. Without powerful copywriting, especially writing to show “what’s in it for your fans”, engagement will NOT happen.

 

5. Set the time that you want to push out the updates to your social media pages on each day of the week.

 

6. Track how your posts perform using their reports, which combines data across different social media platforms.

Of course, not forgetting that Beatrix works with all the major social media platforms excluding Pinterest, not just Facebook. And for just $15-$20/month, that’s certainly better than hiring full-time social media managers for a small business, which is unlikely to have enough resources to create original and branded content to share regularly on their social media frontiers.

However, no tool is perfect. I think Beatrix can do certain things better to compel me to sign up for a paid version. If any of these is a deal-breaker for you, then you might want to look elsewhere to fulfil your needs:

1. [UPDATE: This feature is actually available via the paid version, check it out here] More specific content topic choices: for me, it’s really about sharing content related to the pain points of my audience. If the content is not specific enough, it will not drive enough engagement. In other words, the post is a waste. In my case, the allowance was for #marketing content in general but I wanted posts that were more specific to social media marketing, and perhaps even containing only Facebook and Instagram marketing content.
2. Related to the above point, I hope that Beatrix will allow me to choose which sources I’d like content to be shared. Although there’s a function to check my sources weekly, I also want to include articles from certain sources, like Jon Loomer, SocialMediaExaminer, and Seth Godin, among many others.
3. Furthermore, with the above function I should be able to mix in a little of my own branded content. Of course, this can’t happen for small businesses which don’t have a blog or a regular content publishing site. But if Beatrix can do point 2, it can become my integrated social media content generator + scheduling assistant. That would be brilliant!
4. Moving forward, I hope Beatrix includes more visual kinds of content - images, infographics, popular presentation slides from Slideshare, etc.

 

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