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ContentStudio is social media management software that combines the content discovery of Buzzsumo with the scheduling and buffering capability of Buffer. Both these tools are market-leading in the capabilities they offer. Can a tool that claims to offer all-in-one functionality be any good? We’ll find out in this ContentStudio review. Is ContentStudio the best value social media management software?
If after reading this ContentStudio review you want to try it out, you can get yourself a free trial. I believe this is truly one of the best options for social media management software and is an alternative to Buffer and BuzzSumo. ContentStudio combines content discovery with content marketing. Doesn’t that sound like a great combination? Let’s learn more in this social media management software review of ContentStudio.
The importance of social media marketing to businesses
Social media marketing is now a staple of any marketing mix. When it comes to promoting your message, increasing awareness and generating demand, a good social media campaign is almost unbeatable for the small business. However, social media can help you reach new audiences and goes a long way towards nurturing your prospects.
- There are 3.1 billion active social media users around the world.
- This is a YoY social media growth of 13%
- The number of people who use social media has grown 14% YoY
- Globally Facebook has the biggest share of social media usage
Finding good quality content for social media is a challenge
A 2017 survey by Sprout Social found that 42% of social media users would be prompted to purchase if brands are sharing educational content and 38% if brands are sharing interesting visuals. However, every business knows finding content that will be interesting to their audience is a challenge.
Best practice dictates that a majority of your social posts should be third-party content. First party/branded content should be used sparingly. Of course, the proportion differs depending on what’s social network your posting to. LinkedIn is much more accepting of branded content, while Twitter responds better to nonbranded posts. The challenge of finding third-party content that is both relevant and will resonate with our audience applies to every business.
Finding the right content is only part of the challenge. As a business, you need to share content at the right time to the right channels. Once you’ve found the right content you then need to think about how and when it will be posted to your social channels. You could post it immediately, or more likely, you will want to schedule it. Scheduling is important because you need to post fresh content at the times it’s most likely to reach the audience you want to connect with. In any case, you can’t post all your social media content in one swoop, so having a tool you can use to schedule content is a must.
Using social media management software such as ContentStudio
The sudden growth of social media management software has been remarkable. HootSuite was founded in 2008 but today has 15 million users and can count 800 of the Fortune 1000 in its list of customers. The new social media software and tools we are seeing isn’t limited to social media management. Social media solutions cover a wide spectrum from social media listening and social selling, to social media employee advocacy.
What is ContentStudio?
ContentStudio is a content discovery and social media management platform. Aimed at small businesses, ContentStudio aims to make it much easier to publish content on both social networks and blogs. Its capabilities put in the realm of content marketing software rather than limiting it to social media management.
Here at FullerFunnels, ContentStudio has become our main social media management software. We use it to find great content and schedule it. The content goes to our social media channels and to some of our blogs. In our digital marketing stack, ContentStudio has largely replaced our use of Buffer and entirely replaced Buzzsumo.
An alternative to Buffer? – ContentStudio
ContentStudio is a great alternative to Buffer. Buffer is an awesome social media scheduling tool however not only does ContentStudio include within it all the core functionality of Buffer it extends upon it with the content discovery aspect which isn’t available in Buffer.
An alternative to BuzzSumo? – ContentStudio
The content discovery capabilities of BuzzSumo are renowned within social media circles. Is ContentStudio a match? Not yet but it could be soon. However, ContentStudio gives you the capability to easily schedule content to social accounts or blogs. This isn’t something BuzzSumo offers and BuzzSumo costs a lot more than ContentStudio.
ContentStudio review of capabilities
- ContentStudio allows users to discover and share content.
- Content can be shared on social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest.
- In addition to social networks, ContentStudio also supports publishing to WordPress(self-hosted), Medium and Tumblr.
- The content discovery feature of content studio allows users to search a number of channels including Facebook, YouTube and more broadly the web for relevant content.
- Within the content discovery module, content can be sorted based on social shares and filtered based on date.
- Pre-defined content topics can be set up which gives you one-click access to content filtered based on your requirements.
- The content publication feature set of content studio allows you to either pull in content from the discovery section or create content from scratch.
- Content can be published to a number of social networks or blogs.
- ContentStudio allows for immediate publication, scheduling, or queuing of content.
- ContentStudio allows for different schedules to be set up for each social network.
- Besides discovery and publication, one of the unique selling points that gives ContentStudio a distinct advantage over tools like Buffer or HootSuite is the ability to set up automations.
- Social media automation in ContentStudio allows users to publish content to their blogs or social networks automatically based on rules they have set up. This means the entire process from discovery to promotion of content can be automated with rules.
ContentStudio review of features and benefits
I’ve highlighted some of the capabilities of ContentStudio but what does this mean in practice for businesses and marketers? In this ContentStudio review, I’ll cover some of the core features and business benefits you may realize.
Content discovery with ContentStudio
Using ContentStudio it’s possible to find the most popular content around a given topic. For example, you can search on a topic and filter down based on most shares in a given time period. “Most shares” is based on Facebook or Pinterest shares. This means you instantly know what content is generating the most engagement, and can use this in your marketing.
Find the most popular content on YouTube and other networks
By default, ContentStudio gives you the most popular web pages (based on how many shares they have received). However, you can also look for content on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and others. This content can then be cross-posted to other channels.
Setup topics based on keywords and filters
Rather than needing to enter multiple keywords on each visit ContentStudio allows you to set up topics. Topics are a mixture of keywords and websites relevant to your interests. For the small business this has two advantages, firstly it’s a big timesaver and second, it means that you can exclude competitor websites from your searches.
Publish relevant content to blogs and social media
Once you’ve found the content you want to share, ContentStudio makes it easy for you to then publish that content onto your social networks and even your blogs. This means you can quickly and efficiently queue up plenty of fresh and relevant content for your social channels.
Schedule, queue or immediately post content
One of the main advantages of having a social media management tool is the fact that you can publish content at the time of your choosing and ContentStudio does not fail here. It gives you plenty of options making it easy for you to publish content at the best time for your audience.
Automate your social media marketing
A compelling feature of ContentStudio is the ability to automate many of the content discovery and publication tasks. You could, in fact, automate the entire flow from content discovery through to publication to social feeds and blogs. My recommendation would be to hold this content in draft form and require manual approval before publishing. Spending time to setup an automation that works well for you means that your social media management time could be reduced down to a minimum.
Areas for improvement in ContentStudio
With any tool, there are going to be areas for improvement although as you can see ContentStudio already offers great functionality. In this ContentStudio review, I’ll highlight some of the areas where ContentStudio is weak and could be improved. A few areas I would like to see developed are:
- Improvements to the content discovery database. You may find in your specific niche that there are websites missing from content discovery. it’s possible to add these websites manually, but it’s a step that could be avoided as the database grows.
- By default, ContentStudio will create a short link for all content being shared. There should be an option to turn this on or off. There is a workaround to this which is to add the same link in twice. ContentStudio will only shorten one, however, this is a ‘hack’ that could be avoided with a simple tick box.
- It isn’t possible to shuffle content. As you go through the process of finding content, you may add content from the same website, multiple times. Adding a shuffle content function would mean that at any point you can shuffle the order in which content will be published. This is functionality Buffer offers and will hopefully be considered for ContentStudio.
- It’s not yet possible to schedule content to Instagram. So far only a limited number of social media management applications are permitted to do this, and I look forward to ContentStudio adding this functionality.
- A further improvement I would like to see is Zapier Integration. Zapier is a platform that allows you to easily connect multiple, disparate systems together.
ContentStudio review conclusion
No ContentStudio review would be complete without a final recommendation. As you can see from this review, ContentStudio offers plenty of functionality. Often many tools add-in functionality that either over complicates the product or is functionality that you may actually never use (but still pay for). ContentStudio manages to offer advanced functionality yet keeps its core purpose clear. If you’re a beginner it’s easy to find and share content. The pricing tiers of ContentStudio allows anyone to start for free. For the more advanced user or social media team, there’s plenty within ContentStudio that will optimize and streamline your social media marketing. At this price point, I see ContentStudio as the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to social media management software. I give ContentStudio a strong buy recommendation.
ContentStudio replaces many of the costly tools and platforms you might already be using in one package. You can start using Content Studio with a free plan, so go ahead and get your free account today!