Megan Freeman is the Marketing and Communications Specialist and City Clerk for the City of Ballwin, Missouri. She keeps busy, juggling more than a dozen social media accounts. As a former journalist, Megan had used Social News Desk in several of her previous jobs, and knew that SND would be a great solution for centralizing the city’s social media management. “I last used SND a couple of years ago,” Freeman says, “and with how you guys have changed the user interface, I find it a lot easier to use, and I think I was kind of surprised by how easy to use it is.”
SND saves time, effort over other publishing tools
Using Meta’s Business Manager to publish to multiple pages was time-consuming and confusing, Freeman says. “Using SND in place of [Meta] is very time-saving for me, because I don’t have to log in or switch profiles from Parks and Rec, to the city, to the Police Department – it’s all in one place, and I can just click which accounts I want to post to, so I don’t have to toggle back and forth.”
“We were looking for something where we could go to one webpage instead of having to click through all those different accounts,” she says. After switching to SND, Freeman saw a remarkable time savings – cutting her time to publish by 83%. “It probably took at least 15 minutes to try to get something posted on all our different accounts. But now, it takes maybe two and a half minutes.”
“It’s so nice to have a company that will listen to what you need and say, ‘Oh yeah, let’s look into that and see what that would be like!’“
Megan Freeman, Marketing and
Communications Specialist, City of Ballwin, MO
Robust features for social media success
Freeman saves time in social media planning with Calendar’s drag-and-drop interface, making it easier to see the big picture for social. “It’s nice to be able to plan out a month or two months in advance with Calendar and see what’s going on, and be able to drag and drop posts if I want to move something around or something comes up,” she says. “It’s really user-friendly, which is nice.”
Newsin.bio also helps the City of Ballwin’s parks and recreation department with promoting sign-ups for city events. “For all the programming we do for parks and rec, a lot of our URLs are super long,” Freeman says. “So it’s really nice to just tell people to click the Newsin.bio link, and they can go and register right away. That’s been very time-saving and very helpful.”
Easy onboarding with friendly customer service
Having a simple, straightforward interface made it easy for Freeman to train her colleague Mark Reckert, the Public Information Officer for the Ballwin Police Department. Freeman says SND’s support team was helpful in getting him onboarded. “He’s a police officer who does this as a secondary feature of his job, and he was having a couple of issues figuring out his account,” she says. “He was able to email in with a question, and you guys were super helpful in getting back to us and figuring out what was going on.”
But what Freeman really loves about SND is the competitive pricing and the innovative feature set, developed in collaboration with customers. “It’s so nice to have a company that will listen to what you need and say, ‘Oh yeah, let’s look into that and see what that would be like!’” She adds, “Especially with you guys getting into the local government sphere, if we’re experiencing this, I’m sure it’s something other local governments are. In talking with a lot of fellow communication specialists in the cities around here, they’re looking for a platform like this. They’re looking for something that does it all together.”
If you’re ready to learn more about how Social News Desk can help you save time on social media publishing and scheduling, increase citizen engagement, and keep your accounts secure in a single place, get in touch with our friendly team and request a demo today.
