Social media – A corn of wheat

Today is a fun and festive day indeed! Today my first self-published book has been released on Kindle. The title is “How to avoid information overload using social media tools: Steps to feeling calmer and smarter“, and the book is free to download the first three days.

If you use Kindle (otherwise download it for free here), I would be very grateful if you could download it and then send me any feedback by commenting this blog post. This way, I can do some necessary changes before the free period ends. If you like the idea of the book, please write a positive review of it here. The book is free at the beginning, and I am helped by friendly reviews.

I view this as an experiment and a chance to grow. I have studied what people like James Altucher and Tim Ferriss are writing about self-publishing and wanted to try it. Even though I have no illusions about reaching big audiences, I have crossed a mental barrier: None of us need permission from anyone else to write, publish, and sell books on any subject. If I can do it, you can do it.

Let us see where this lands. Meanwhile, cheers!

Social media has been around for a long time. It has been everything from ridiculed to mind numbingly praised, but still we seem to lack the ONE tool to rule them all. Why?

Basically, working with posting to, and covering, social media channels should be a breeze. But so far, it seems I need to use at least two tools to get my job done professionally:

Hootsuite needs no introduction and it is an awesome tool for covering social channels. I tend to view it as awesome for Twitter, even though they say it is good for everything. Follow and unfollow, use tabs, lists, replies and posts, yes it is all there. I love it for keeping track easily of everything Twitter. But the scheduling function? And the graphical layout? Well, please update.

The other tool is CoSchedule and I heard about it first via Michael Hyatt’s “The one tool you need to master social media“. It looks super cool, works flawlessly, integrates with WordPress and more and is a wonderful gift for global teams. But still it lacks what Hootsuite gives us: Complete listings of social channels.

So my advice for the two companies is: Please marry. Add CoSchedule’s gorgeous layout and scheduling with Hootsuite’s very effective listings and you have a winner. You are both very good at engaging customers via courses, tips and tricks, but you are still two tools.

I also wish all the other tools could find each other, instead of being “91 Free Twitter Tools” just for one channel. Great article, but I need less tools, not more, to be effective.

by Lachlan