The Millennium Falcon is arguably the fastest ship in the quadrant. A light freighter with upgraded, hyper-drive engines capable of light-speed, the ship also demonstrates superior maneuverability and resiliency in a fight.
Yet none of that matters.
The Millennium Falcon, all on it’s own, is just a “hunk of junk.” It’s only when it’s piloted by the most unlikely of friends, Han Solo and the wookie Chewbacca, that the Falcon becomes the kind of ship even Darth Vader covets.
Is it a stretch to say that Hootsuite and Evernote work together like Han Solo and Chewbacca? Sure, but we’re going to run with it anyways. I’ve partnered up with Evernote Expert Jason Frasca to present you with these classic maneuvers designed to increase your productivity and efficiency, and I’ll let you decide which one of us is the wookie.
The Antilles Maneuver
At their core, Evernote is best suited for taking and saving notes, while Hootsuite is best suited for sharing updates to various social channels, so draw from that strength, let it flow through you. Use Evernote to craft and save important social media messages that you intend to use again and again in the future, so that sharing to social is as easy as copy & paste into Hootsuite.
This is ideally suited for regular business messages that you might share, in addition to your regular and curated content. Remember, it’s OK to let your followers know what you do, as long as you do so tactfully, and make that a small portion of your overall social media activity.
The Moravian Maneuver
A more advanced maneuver than The Antilles, The Moravian Maneuver takes that saved social post to the next level. Instead of just crafting a normal text message, take advantage of the special formatting that Google+ permits and craft a more lengthy post. Use asterisks around words to make them *bold* or underscores to make them _italics_ as needed.
Use hard returns for paragraph breaks.
Use special characters like ✉ ✍ ✎ to add interest and uniqueness.
Include one or more links to resources. And here’s where this gets really interesting. If you use Hootsuite to generate the shortened links for the resources, like this: http://owl.li/GKtdK, you can create a report within Hootsuite (for free) that will track clicks to those links.
So suppose you have a collection of resources within your blog or website that you’d like to share to social on a regular basis. You can have the post drawn up and saved within Evernote, and a report within Hootsuite to track clicks on on your chosen links. You can then copy and paste that into a status update, and schedule it out to be shared on a regular basis.
Here’s a recent example post:
The Phr’shan Maneuver
Create a note for Google+ users that you like to mention when sharing specific posts and save their user IDs. You can use the ID on Google+ posts to activate a mention. When crafting your status update within Hootsuite, just use @ and their ID to automatically insert their name into the shared post.
The Dragon Kite Maneuver
Have a note of prepared Tweets and Social Shares and share the note or notebook with Team Members. This is great for when you want to collaborate on your social activity, or just need to assign a task to someone else.
The Tron Boral Maneuver
Install the Evernote for HootSuite app to bring your notebooks and notes into your dashboard as a stream(s). With easy access to your notes, you can not only easily share content, but the notes themselves! Share a note and it automatically converts from Private to Public.
The Covert Shroud Maneuver
Use one or more notes to map out your editorial calendar, and then schedule that activity in HootSuite.
For instance, you will likely want to mix up your social media activity so that it’s a combination of different kinds of posts. You might share some of your own articles, curate articles from other sources, share tips, quotes and other tidbits of information, and of course, as we mentioned earlier, sprinkle in some information about who you are and what your business does. You can use Evernote to create and organize all of that information first, and then use Hootsuite to schedule it all out.
The Marg Sabl Maneuver
Plug your favorite website RSS fees into HootSuite using the Syndicator app. This will give you one or more streams containing all kinds of great content that you can read, choose to share out to select social profiles, or clip to Evernote for later reading or reference. This is particularly useful if you’re Newsjacking and have your typical sources feeding into HootSuite. You can clip a timely press release and build your blog post off that note, making the information with the release easily accessible.
The Wotan Weave Maneuver
Prepare for conferences, events or Meetup’s by pre-typing Google Plus or Twitter hashtag or handles of attendees you want to mention in Evernote.
For example, remembering or typing long complicated hashtags is challenging and difficult in the moment at an event. Pre-typing the hashtag and copy from Evernote and paste to Twitter or Google Plus is an efficient use of Evernote. Pre-typing tweets your sure to send, such as: This Meetup is starting to buzz for X,Y,Z speaker tonight. #mrsocialmedia This is a real time saver. Spend more time networking and less time typing.
The Silerian Stall Maneuver
Collecting information from various social media sources is a significant part of the research process for any blog post, article or brief. There are many social media outlets to collect data from and several ways to save them to Evernote:
Here are some popular ways to collect social media to Evernote:
- Evernote Web Clipper (more info: http://bit.ly/16w4T7Q)
- Email social media posts to Evernote, either from the network or from within Hootsuite
- Feedly Premium – fully integrates directly to your Evernote
- Pocket – fully integrates directly to your Evernote
- Clipping Google Plus Posts to Evernote: http://jmf.im/1kTF216
The hard part will be finding all the great data you have saved. In order to do so, you need a great plan. Here are some tips:
Assign every note saved from social media for blog post ideas and add 1 common tag. This will help you find your note no matter what service you used to curate and the information. A tag idea for this would be “Social Research.”
A second tag to consider would be the topic, such as: Social Media, Content Marketing, etc. Now here is where it is gets a bit tricky and is going to require some discipline on your part. Most of these services will not pre-populate the Evernote Tag for you when sending to Evernote. Which means you will have to type the Tag precisely every time. Sounds easy with 3 tags, not so easy with 30 or more. Often you do get to pick which Notebook you want to send the Evernote Note to as well. Select the same designated Evernote Notebook each time for easy retrieval.
The alternative to trying to remember Tags and Notebooks while saving resources on your mobile device and working in 3rd party services is to send all data to the Evernote default Notebook. Once the Notes are in Evernote, you can sort the Notes, give them proper titles, tags and file them to designated Notebook of your choice. This may add an extra step at the beginning to your research process, but will save you 4 steps and a ton of frustration at the end when you are hunting for the notes when it comes time to writing content.
The Talon Roll Maneuver
Now that you have curated all this wonderful content from social media sources, don’t let it sit in your Evernote lonely. Share it! The one tag I did not mention in number 4 above is the “To” Tag. Add the “To” Tag to specific Notes that you want to share and to what specific channels you want to share them from.
For example: you came across a recipe with a beautiful picture of BBQ. Perfect to share on your Pinterest Board. Add the “To Pinterest” Tag.
Another example is a post on content marketing that you want to share to your Content Marketing Community on Google Plus next week. Add the Tag “To Google Plus.”
A 3rd example might be a Tag called “To All” intended to share across all your social media channels. Or, “To Star Wars” for Star Wars Tuesday shares on Google Plus. You get the idea.
Now, drag these “To” tags to your Evernote Shortcuts bar on the left hand side of your Evernote so you have easy access to them so you can share them via Hootsuite later on.
The Skywalker Loop Maneuver
The most challenging of all maneuvers, yet one of the most interesting, involves incorporating IFTTT (IF This Than That) to automatically save favorited tweets into Evernote. As we mentioned earlier, you can bring a stream of Evernote notes into Hootsuite, which means you can use this maneuver to create a stream within Hootsuite of your favorited tweets.
Here is the recipe to make this happen: Save Favorite Tweets via IFTTT
First, set up the IFTTT recipe which will require you to connect your Evernote and Twitter accounts to IFTTT. Moving forward all Tweets that you favorite will automatically be saved to the Notebook and Tags you you choose in IFTTT.
This can become quite overwhelming. I highly recommend setting up a specific Notebook to handle the incoming volume. Choose Tags and Notebooks to find your Tweets easily such as:
Notebooks: Social Media or Twitter
Tags: twitterfavs
If you haven’t already, add the Evernote app within Hootsuite and create a stream for your new notes. Regrettably, the app does not yet permit the selection of specific notebooks or tags — it just shows a stream of your most recent Evernote Notes. But depending on how you utilize your Twitter Favorite button, this could still be incredibly useful.
As an aside, while you’re in IFTTT, you can also archive all your Tweets including retweets and replies. Here is the recipe to make this happen.
All the same as above except here you are going to get Every Tweet, Retweet and reply where you are mentioned. If you did not set up a separate Evernote Notebook above, be sure to do so if you turn this IFTTT recipe on!
These recipes are also available through Zapier, but IFTTT seemed to be an easier process to setup and share, and there appeared to be no additional benefits.
Which Maneuver is your favorite? Which one do you think buys you a quick getaway from Imperial forces?
Maneuvers cited from starwars.wikia.com.
Millennium Falcon image via Flickr.
About Jason Frasca
Jason is an Evernote Business Certified Consultant providing Evernote consulting to individuals and businesses looking to get started, or design a full blown Evernote solution for their business.
In 2014 Frasca authored his first book, Evernote Success: Strategy and Tactics To Set Up A Successful Evernote Environment.
