Social media is seen as a taxing, time-consuming chore by many small business owners. They know a social media presence is crucial in appealing to today’s consumer, but they simply don’t have the time or resources to do it. Enter: DrumUp. DrumUp is a new social media management tool, marketed toward small businesses that find themselves floundering when it comes to social media upkeep. You might be thinking, “Aren’t there already a bunch of social media management tools out there?” You aren’t wrong. So what makes DrumUp so special? And how helpful is it actually for small businesses? That’s exactly what you’ll discover in this edition of “Prospect Genius Reviews…”
Given how vital it is to have a continuous presence on social media, it makes sense that there would be several platforms and tools to help businesses manage it all. Popular ones include Hootsuite, TweetDeck, and Buffer. They help businesses connect with their audiences at all times by enabling them to manage multiple profiles from a single platform, schedule posts in advance, and track their posts’ engagement rates. If your business has a lot of content to share, these platforms make sharing much more efficient.
However, what do you do if you’re a small business without much of your own content to share? You can write your own brief status updates, but this doesn’t always engage your audience or start a conversation. Ideally, you would balance it out by sharing articles, pictures, videos, and other content relevant to what you do and what your audience wants to see. Realistically, though, this requires spending a big chunk of time searching for good, quality content to share. Most small business owners simply don’t have the spare time to do this, nor do they have the budget to hire a social media marketer to do it for them.
This is where DrumUp distinguishes itself from the pack. It solves two problems at once. Not only does it enable scheduling and management for multiple accounts all from one location, but it also finds the content businesses want to share with their audiences in the first place. In this way, DrumUp is an all-in-one platform for discovering and sharing content. And it saves So. Much. Time.
How does it work?
When you make an account on DrumUp, you add all of the different social media profiles you wish to manage. Then, it prompts you to choose the specific keywords you’d like your content to focus on. (Note: You can use different sets of keywords for different accounts, which comes in handy if you’re managing accounts for more than one entity.) These keywords should target the interests of your audience. Inputting these keywords enables DrumUp’s natural language processing (NLP) technology to work its magic and curate recent, relevant content from all across the web. The more specific your keywords, the more targeted your content will be.
DrumUp presents this curated content as a customized feed tailored to your company’s interests. Here, you can scroll through the content and, whenever an article strikes you as particularly interesting or relevant to your audience, you simply click a button right underneath the article to share it. You have two options: one-click scheduling, which will automatically select a time for the article to post, or manually scheduling the post yourself.
A neat feature of DrumUp’s one-click scheduling is that the platform won’t automatically stack multiple posts on top of each other (as we feared it might). Instead, when we tried it*, it scheduled the first post 30 minutes into the future, and the second one for the following morning at 9:15am. This spacing makes your content sharing look natural and prevents your followers from feeling like they’re being spammed. By using this one-click feature, you could spend less than 15 minutes selecting articles and have two to three days’ worth of posts. In other words, your social media work is pretty much done for you.
However, a potential downside of the one-click scheduling option is that you don’t get to add your own captions or commentary on whatever you’re sharing. You can only do this when you manually schedule the post. At the same time, though, manually scheduling a post only takes an additional minute or two, so small business owners shouldn’t see this as a substantial roadblock.
Another potential downside is the absence of any analytics. For the data obsessed, you may flinch at the idea of not being able to track the performance of each post (the way you can with those other, more popular platforms). However, if you’re going from zero social media presence to using DrumUp on a consistent basis, then you’re already making significant strides. So, again, this may not be a huge issue for many small business owners who are just looking to improve their overall presence.
All in all, Prospect Genius reviews DrumUp as just shy of a godsend for small businesses with limited resources. While there are some technical limitations, we believe the pros far outweigh the cons. As long as you choose specific, relevant keywords, DrumUp will deliver high-quality content straight to your feed, and you can share that content with a single click of your mouse. After the initial setup, the amount of time it will save you is incredible. Don’t be surprised if we start using it ourselves!
Next time on “Prospect Genius Reviews…,” we’ll check out Pixlr, a free, online image-editing tool.
*For the record, the “Prospect Genius Reviews…” team only tested out DrumUp’s free plan. The free plan allows a maximum of two accounts and three posts per day, and it does not allow image uploading. There are four additional plans that you can upgrade to; they range from $19 per month to >$199.
