Measured Voice: A New Tool for your Social Media Activities 0
It’s hard to differentiate the various social media tools based on their marketing messages. There are plenty of options out there. The only real way to understand what a solution can do for you is to work with it.
And that’s what I’ve been doing for some of my clients – managing our social media posts, messages and workflow. In the past I’ve used HootSuite and TweetDeck in my client work (I still use TweetDeck for my personal use), and most recently, I’ve been working in Measured Voice. I use Measured Voice to send Tweets and Facebook updates, both in real time and via the scheduling feature.
Measured Voice is a web-based solution designed “to help you and your team write great social media messages.” It allows numerous team members to collaborate and schedule messages for Twitter and Facebook. The solution also allows you to create custom guidelines for your messages, workflow for approvals and delivers analytics.
Interestingly, the Measured Voice website describes the solution as providing a “distraction-free environment.” Despite working in Measured Voice for months, that aspect never occurred to me. And now I realize it’s a great benefit. It eliminates the “shiny object” aspect of the Twitter stream.
Overall, I like Measured Voice. I find it intuitive and easy to use – much more so than HootSuite and TweetDeck. Those that work in social media full time may like how “busy” HootSuite and TweetDeck are, but others for whom social media is only one aspect of their job are likely to embrace the simplicity of the Measured Voice interface.
I use Measured Voice primarily for its scheduling features. I like that I can go back and easily edit scheduled messages, and that I receive an email each Sunday of the tweets I have scheduled for the next week. Each morning I also receive an email of the tweets scheduled for that day. The latter feature is very important to me. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m against scheduling blog posts. It’s easy to schedule a blog post, forget about it and then have an unfortunate timing incident. Here’s what I said about scheduling blog posts.
That said, I do like scheduling tweets in advance. But I also like that I get a reminder of what I’ve queued up. These two features were critical to me a few weeks ago. As a resident of Watertown, I needed to reschedule my tweets scheduled for a few days after the Marathon Bombings. With all that was going on, there was a big chance I’d forget I had some tweets scheduled. Measured Voice reminded me of what I had scheduled and made it easy for me to go into each tweet and simply select a different date for it to go out.
Measured Voice provides analytics for what the company considers the three most important metrics for social media: reach, kudos and engagement. The tool provides two views of the metrics – you can scroll over the icons and get the big picture on reach, kudos and engagement, or you can go into the reports tab and see the metrics for each message.
Measured Voice: Reach, Kudos & Engagement
Interestingly, the company does not consider follower counts as a meaningful metric on its own.
“It’s very tempting to look at a high follower count as a measure of success, but we continually warn people against focusing on it too much,” said Jed Sundwall, co-founder, Measured Voice. “Your primary focus should be to provide value for your audience, and it’s ok if your audience isn’t massive. If you communicate with care, your audience will reward you by sharing your messages and recommending you to their friends – your audience will grow over time. A large follower count is great as long as it reflects the actual value you provide, but a huge audience isn’t worth much if no one cares about what you’re saying.”
Measured Voice – the software – was built in 2009 – and is, like most social media tools, being updated on a regular basis. The current version has a new feature which I’ve longed for – an auto-complete for mentioning other Twitter handles. Since my clients follow several thousand Twitter accounts, I have difficulty remembering the exact Twitter handle I want to reference. In the past that meant a quick search on Twitter to make sure I had it correct. Auto-complete saves me from having to do that.
The company was founded by Sundwall and Lee Vann and officially launched in 2011. It was one of seven elite startups selected by Code for America’s Inaugural Accelerator Program. Which brings me to an interesting point – Sundwall and his team have chosen to focus on government organizations as its target market.
Given the simplicity of the user interface and the “distraction-free” environment, I think this makes a lot of sense – especially as a marketer. But as a user I think Measured Voice is a great tool for anyone who manages Twitter and Facebook activities for nearly any type of organization.
Like many software solutions on the market today, Measured Voice offers a free trial. I recommend checking it out.
– Kelley –
@KelleyLynnK