For many, blogging is a business, whether it be full-time or part-time. As such, a blogger needs to take advantage of certain tools and resources to achieve the 3 M’s of Blogging — monetization, marketing, and (social) media.
Therefore, I would recommend the following 5 must-have social media tools for blogging success:
1. Twitterfeed
According to their homepage, “Twitterfeed’s service is intended to augment, supplement or enhance the service provided by Twitter, Inc.” Basically, Twitterfeed gives you the opportunity to take a site’s RSS feed and send new posts directly to Twitter without having to do it manually. This is an effective way to promote not only your own posts on Twitter, but also any other blog’s posts that you trust. It’s a huge time saver and builds value in your own Twitter feed.
2. LinkedIn
Per LinkedIn’s About page, “Our mission is simple: connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” In essence, LinkedIn is the #1 social network for professionals — including blogging professionals. This platform is just one more way for you to connect with others in your field. LinkedIn has over 220 million users, so you can see the possibilities. Many bloggers find that Linkedin falls in the top 5 when it comes to traffic and referrals, so it is definitely worth a look.
3. HootSuite
HootSuite describes themselves as “a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard.” In a nutshell, HootSuite allows you to set up teams and manage all your main social media accounts from one place. It also has tracking and analysis tools so you can effectively track and analyze your social media campaigns. Measuring your results can be a great way to decide what is working in your social media efforts and what is not.
4. iUnfollow
Now, before there is a great uprising, let me first say that I am already aware of the pros and cons of unfollowing accounts on Twitter. I am also aware that we can spend a great amount of time and energy debating those pros and cons. That’s not what this is about — at least not for me. I am not advocating any kind of mass unfollowing here. I am merely providing a possible tool for anyone who feels, as I do, that the list of those followed needs to be cleaned up from time to time. That’s where iUnfollow comes in. It is a very user-friendly, easy-to-use tool that allows you to unfollow certain Twitter accounts of your choosing. It also gives you the option to create a whitelist of accounts you don’t ever want to unfollow.
5. Pinterest
Pinterest is quickly becoming one of the globe’s top social media sites. It is only 3 years old, but already has nearly 50 million users. A recent survey of bloggers from across the web shows that Pinterest is a top 5 web traffic generator. Pinterest is also used by more than half of the top 100 companies worldwide. In fact, Pinterest is now driving more traffic and revenue than Facebook.
What do you think? Which other social media tools would you add to this must-have list?
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