In this solo Speak PR podcast episode, Jim James explains how a smartphone can serve as a full‑featured outside broadcast unit for public relations. He begins by noting that any PR professional must first have active accounts on the social platforms they wish to use (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google My Business, YouTube, WeChat, Weibo, etc.) and can either post directly from each platform’s native app or, more efficiently, use a social‑media aggregation tool. Jim walks through the capabilities of Zoho Social – the app he currently uses – highlighting its free tier, URL shortener, ZShare browser extension, one‑click channel connections, scheduling options (smart schedule, repeat posts), analytics, team collaboration, and tiered pricing. He then surveys the broader market, summarising the core features, platform coverage, pricing, and unique selling points of Buffer, Hootsuite, HubSpot, AgoraPulse, Sprout Social, StatusBrew, and eClincher. Throughout, he stresses the importance of repurposing and reposting content to overcome the short shelf‑life of posts across different time zones, and he ties these tactics to the Speak PR methodology (Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, Know). Jim concludes by reminding listeners that the phone, combined with an affordable aggregator app, can broadcast content globally in real time, even offline, and points listeners to the free Technology Applications Directory (esospr.com), the Speak PR mastermind, and the 5‑stage methodology for building a brand without a big‑agency budget.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and on this show I like to share tools and practical tips that I know will work for getting a company noticed. And today I'm going to talk about the handphone because I'm working on a course at the moment at the speakpr.co Mastermind where we're looking at how the tool in your hand can help to build your brand. I did an earlier podcast about how you can take photographs, obvious enough, but also some of the apps that you can use for coloring those, for captioning them, for making them into montages. And today I'm going to look at the power of the phone for distribution, because our phones have connectivity hardwired into them and we can use that. Now I'm going to look at the 2 different ways of sending out content on your phone. One is through platform to platform and the other through the aggregators. That we can use to save time. Now, first of all, what we have to do, of course, is to have accounts with all the social media channels that we want to use. Now, for my business, for East West PR, I have Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google My Business, and Instagram. And because I have a company in China, I also have a WeChat and a Weibo account. I also have YouTube. But what I then do is have the mobile phone app of each of these on my phone so that if I want to take a photograph and I've maybe edited it, maybe added a caption, for example, I can, if I want to, send the image directly to one or other of these different platforms. And that's— that can be pretty handy. But of course it takes a lot of time. So a better way is to use one of these aggregation tools. This is the way that you can amplify your content at scale but without any more time. So in the Speak PR program, where we talk about storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and know, amplification is really the part of public relations and communications that's benefited perhaps the most from technology. Because the technology now enables us to basically batch process the posting. And on the mobile phone, we have much of the functionality that you have on the desktop, but of course you have the benefit that on the phone you've been actually taking the content to start with. And many moons ago, I used to use Hootsuite, and at the moment I'm using the Zoho platform. And the Zoho platform I have embedded down on my phone as well, and an app. And one of the reasons I like Zoho is because it has a free platform offering, so you could publish on all networks with one team member, one brand, and it includes the URL shortener and the ZShare browser extension, which means that if I want to share something that someone else has already shared on, for example, the internet on a website, I I can use the ZShare browser and send that through to my different networks. So I like that a lot. Now the functionality, let's just look at what you get to do. So with something like the Zoho Social, you connect your Facebook, your Twitter, your Instagram, your LinkedIn, the Google My Business, all into the app. So you do that at the browser. By just allowing and authorizing the Zoho Social to use the app API and go through to those other channels. Now, the functionality of these platforms is all pretty similar, so let me just tell you what some of those are, and then I'll go on to some of the competitors that we've got to Zoho, which include companies like AgoraPulse. We've got, we've got the Sprout Social, which is very good. We have Hootsuite, which has been in the business for a long time. And we've got StatusBrew. And we've got eClincher. And we've got Buffer, which is a well-known one as well. So I'll talk about those afterwards. If I just talk about some of the functionality that you've got on your mobile phone by connecting the platform, be it Zoho or Buffer or Hootsuite or HubSpot, what you do is you connect with one click then all of your different channels. So you can post something using one of these aggregation platforms, and you can either publish it there and then, or you can choose to schedule it. Some like the Zoho— if all of them now really have these smart schedule features Some choose then the schedule according to how much content you've already got lined up, and some of them choose it by the next available slot, and some choose it by the slot which has given you the best results. You can also repeat posts. So within the Speak PR methodology, we talk about the need for repurposing content but also reposting certain posts, because as we've talked about before, a tweet, for example, lasts just 18 minutes. A Facebook post less than 60 minutes and a YouTube video less than 5 days. So the shelf life of the content can be very short, and especially if you're posting across multiple time zones, you might want to repeat the same post on an Asian time zone, European, and American time zone. So looking at the ability to repost existing content is really important. Now, some other features to think about. One is the ability to upload content and depose it so that you could, for example, create a whole bunch of content. Maybe you need someone to review it with you. Another is that you've got some statistics available as to what's happened and some reports. And another aspect can be collaboration if there's a team. Now, with the Zoho Basic program, which is free, it's just one team member and one brand. But if you want to add 2 members with one brand and have 7 different channels, it's £8 per month. And you can upgrade. So Professional has one brand with 7 channels but 3 team members who can then collectively post content, for example. And you can also then have different reports per brand. For £160 a month, you can have 10 brands and 5 team members and so on. So it becomes more sophisticated. We have more people managing the content for you. But if you're on your own and you're just using your mobile phone, you could do worse than to use the Zoho Social, which is free to use and connects to your platforms. Now just let's look at some of the other ones that you could look at. Same sort of sets of features that you want to be looking for. Now, I've mentioned Buffer, which also allows you to schedule and post your content to social media, and it supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. And I've been surprised, to be honest, by the amount of content that I'm getting onto the Google My Business Even though I run a PR firm, I'm getting over 1,000 to 1,400 searches a week on my Google My Business. Now, if we look at Buffer, which is one of the main players in this space, 75,000 companies trust Buffer, so that can't be wrong. There you can publish your content, you can analyze your campaigns as well, and as most of these platforms do now, they give you the ability to send from your phone but manage from your web browser. So that's impressive, really. You can measure and report on the progress of your individual campaigns and individual posts, and you can also start to manage communities. So they have also some extra tools like a story planner, for example, the ability to link your content to a shopping cart. Buffer also enables you to create, save, and organize hashtags, which can be pretty useful, and to do some tagging as well. So there's some functionality in Buffer that has obviously made it a successful, uh, company by quite a long way. I think the next one that I've used and would support would be Hootsuite, which again you have the mobile phone app, and it was launched back in 2008. And you've got integration again with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube. To some degree, of course, these are all limited by the number of channels that they're connecting to. Now, Hootsuite has been going for quite a long time and has a number of different plans, has some 15 million users, and it connects, you know, you to your brand. And basically you can see channels and the streams of content, and you can have multiple profiles in there, and you can see the different streams of content going in and out of those different channels. So that's a really good plan, but You also need to be thinking about the sort of price that you've got there with that functionality. So Hootsuite starts at £25 a month for the Professional, and you can have 10 social profiles, unlimited scheduling, and 1 user. For a Team, you can have 20 social profiles, unlimited scheduling, 3 users for £99 UK per month, and you can get up to £520 a month if you are an enterprise. They've got 18 million users in 175 countries. So this is really, uh, one of the largest companies in the world when it comes to actually managing the content distribution. HubSpot will be perhaps the other big player, and that's billed as an inbound marketing company. So really all about lead gen about content management, and it's very good. If you want to be spending a minimum of sort of $50 per month to get started, there are some free tools which you can use. But my friends that have used HubSpot in the past said it's a very powerful tool because it has things like inbound, it has CRM, it has a marketing hub. So It really is almost verging onto the Salesforce.com program. So I think if you're going to run that on your mobile phone, it would probably be a bit of overwhelm, Frank. And that's really what I'm, I'm interested in, is the applications that the entrepreneur can use or the small business owner can use that isn't expensive. So let's come back down to earth and look at a product called Agora Pulse. And this is an easy and affordable social media management tool. Now it has a 14-day trial. It's $14 per month and allows 3 profiles and 1 user. So you might have a company profile, you might have a personal profile, and a third profile, for example. Again, for most of us, maybe that's more than we want to be managing, we just want to keep it simple. But again, this has the ability to send content to the social media channels through one click. So that's really what this is about. Plus then they all have differing levels of reporting in real time. Sprout Social is another. Sprout Social again is a social media management software. And they have again different options that you can choose from. But once you've taken your first free 30-day trials, you're looking at $99 a month for the individual user. But it does give you the opportunity to give brand keywords so you can do some searching, and it has a smart inbox feature so that you can get any messages from different websites, for example, into one place. So you're getting into almost CRM language and land there. So allows also some pre-approval if you've got maybe someone using your social media account in the office and you want them to let you see them before they post them. So that's a nice sort of gatekeeper function. Now another one that is perhaps not mainstream is Status Brew. And Status Brew again allows you to send your content to the different channels, but it also then starts to help you to manage some trends in the market by giving you some analytics. And it helps to manage and reduce the advertising across your social media channels and also helps to identify fraudulent and misleading brands and campaigns. So it has some sort of more security features in there as well and starts at $1,200 a month. Again, maybe more functionality than we're looking for. eClincher is the last one we're going to look at, and this again has the social media postings and interactions, and again it has a 14-day and then moves on to the $49 per month. Now this connects as well to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google, YouTube, Blogger, and Yelp, so enabling you to connect to maybe a few extra channels. One of the things to bear in mind about, um, Instagram, for example, is that the size of the photograph is different to the photograph dimensions for Facebook and LinkedIn, for example. So that could be a real nuisance. But also what you have to remember as well is that Facebook requires you to enter content uniquely, even when you're posting on one of these aggregators. So eClincher connects to more networks than, for example, Zoho doesn't connect to YouTube, for example. eClincher again helps you to schedule posts, which is a very useful function. And you can also then start to create some of your own image canvas and designs within their image editor. But as I've mentioned, there are already image editors out there that one can use that are standalone and maybe more flexible. So you can create, uh, content on eClincher. Zoho doesn't allow you to create any content, just to publish it. Okay, and again, eClincher does what most of these do, which is to centralize all of your social interactions straight away. So it seems as though there are a number of tools that you can use. There are, as I've mentioned, Zoho Social, you've got Buffer, you've got Hootsuite, HubSpot, Agora Pulse, you've got Sprout Social, Status Brew, and eClincher. So, and that's just some of them. And as we know from the, uh, MarTech board, there are over 8,000 tools that you can use. I consolidate them into the 100 in the Technology Applications Directory, which you can get for free at esospr.com. But the point here is that with your phone you can download one of these apps, and once you've taken content— photograph, for example, or a video— you can share that from these apps with one click. You can send to up to 7 platforms, either there and then or schedule them. So the device in your hand can be an amazingly powerful content generator and broadcaster, and it doesn't have to take any time really. As long as you've got Wi-Fi or 4G, you're connected, and if you go offline, you can always schedule it to post once you're back on the internet. So as you're looking at building your own brand for your company or for yourself, think about the tool in your hand and the power that you've got And that even for free you can use some of these platforms. And for a modest fee, $44, $49, $99 a month, you can amplify your message around the world in real time from wherever you are, whenever you are. Now that is great public relations. So thanks so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and if you like this, please subscribe or share it with people. Or subscribe to our website, eswisspr.com, and subscribe to our newsletter. Or come and join me and other like-minded people at the speakpr.co mastermind, where we have our 5-stage Speak PR methodology. So we help people to learn how to help themselves to get noticed without the budget of a big agency. Thank you so much for listening, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health. a profitable business and that you keep on amplifying your message so that the whole world can hear what you've got to share.
