As we invest more in our social profiles we place our trust in large organisations that in many cases won't even know who you really are on one to one basis. If they decide they don't like your account for any reason they can shut down your profiles without notice at any time. It's been seen again and again and touches everyone from unconnected personal profiles all the way through to celebrity and corporate profiles so if you think you are safe you probably aren't.
There is one tool to help you take back control and it's called SocialSafe. At its most basic SocialSafe is a tool that you can use to back up your social media profiles and updates to your own computer. You can simply set up a regular sync so that every status you ever post to your profiles is backed up and protected in the even that the company shuts down or bans your account for any reason.
In most cases SocialSafe not only backs up your data but also keeps a record of your connections for you so if you find yourself in the situation of having to rebuild and reconnect you will have a highly targeted list of who was following your before. If you do nothing else backing up all of your professional social media profiles with Something like SocialSafe is exactly the kind of insurance you need when investing in social media marketing.
SocialSafe As A Marketing Tool
I also mentioned at the go beginning of the article that using SocialSafe presents a few hidden opportunities. You see once SocialSafe actually downloads a local copy of all this data it also provides high level summaries and offers you the ability to export all of your data as well. You can export data or simply use the basic social media analysis tools built right in.
Social Media Insights
You can use the Insights section of the tool if you are not using any more advanced monitoring tools to get a quick feel for the people who are most engaged with your social media profiles by look at the Most Interactions section. Additionally you see what types of content have been working well for you recently by browsing the Most Popular Photos and Status Updates. This on its own is nothing ground breaking if you use other professional monitoring tools but if even if you have it can be a great quick insight that looks across all of your social accounts rather than dipping in and out of various other social media dashboards and you can easily customise the data to look over a custom data period or even the entire lifetime of your accounts.
Mining Your Own Social Media Data Via Export
If you really want to start digging deep into your social media data you can export pretty much anything and create spreadsheets containing the underlying trends in your social media profiles to build charts showing your activity over time, keep track of the growth rates of your profiles and more.
To give an actual example of one of the ways that I use SocialSafe; One thing that has always bugged me in Twitter was the fact that searches on the site are limited to recent updates and if you want to look through the history of your account, you have to forever scroll down as the page reloads the next small batch of Tweets. With SocialSafe you can simply export all of the Tweets from an account, set up searches for specific types of content and mentions and browse your entire history. If you find that perhaps an old dynamic link points to something you would no longer need you can update the links to something more relevant. Alternatively if you you linked to content that is no longer relevant or accurate you can simply use the exported link to visit the Tweet on Twitter and delete it from the site.
Getting Started With SocialSafe
SocialSafe is a paid tool however it really doesn't cost much at all, with its current pricing set at £4.99 / $6.99 per year, a tiny cost in comparison to how much time and effort we invest in these accounts over a year. I've been using this tool for years now and it is constantly being developed and upgraded. On the odd times I've reached out and suggested features or with queries about a particular feature the team has always been very friendly and responsive. Whether you're simply backing up your social media profiles to protect yourself from the social giants or you want to dig into the data behind your profiles I can't recommend SocialSafe enough. I don't have a professional relationship with the company but if you have any questions about getting my post or getting started, just reach out and I'll do my best to help.