Social media has become an essential part of the online marketing platform because of its large user base, unique user experience, and ability to interact with existing and potential customers. It is more essential now than ever to use tools that give you insight into your visitors, collect data that helps you improve your social media efforts, and make your marketing efforts more time efficient.
Tool #1- FollowerWonk
This tool lets you search Twitter bios, compare individual users, analyze followers, track followers and sort followers. It has an analytics part that lets you identify your followers, know where they are located, and know when they tweet.
The “compare users” lets you see what followers the comparison group has in common and tells you how many of their followers are unique to only them. It also displays a summary of the user’s Twitter profile including followers, days on Twitter, percentage of retweet, percentage of @tweets, and percent of URL tweets. When you compare Twitter accounts it will tell you what accounts follow both users and which ones are unique to a user. This way you can find similarities and target newly discovered Twitter users. All of this information is very useful when comparing your twitter presence to that of your competition’s.
The Track Followers displays an interactive graph that tells you how many new followers and lost followers you got in a day by just moving your mouse over it. It also gives you a plus or minus net follower gain or loss. A bar graph breaks down your follower gain and loss based on the days the event happened.
Another great feature that you can use the analyze tool to segment your followers by most influential, how active a user is, followers that tweeted most recently, account age of followers, and the default language of your followers.
Use this If your social media strategy relies heavily on Twitter. Twitter is an incredible tool and every social media strategy should include a comprehensive Twitter plan.
Tool #2- Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management systems out there. You can manage every single social media account while posting material for each account or at the same time. Use the analytics part of the platform to determine which type of social messages drive the most traffic on each social media outlet.
With Hootsuite you can target Facebook audience based on age, country, gender, interests, and relationship status, education level. With your social media platform specific news feed, you can customize the three columns to display something. For example, in my Facebook news feed I made it to show the wall posts, events, and status updates. You can even assign certain team members to be in charge of one stream.
With a click of a button you can select different targeting options depending on your target audience. This should improve your click through rates.
You will be able to schedule your posts and use the analytical information that Hootsuite provides to determine when the best time to post is for each social network. It allows you to filter according to your location. You can search for keywords and phrases which makes working in a group or as a team much easier
Can assign certain team members to be in charge of a specific stream. You can create teams and departments very easily, give people certain permission levels, require approval before publishing certain content, and receive notifications when a member of your team responds to messages. This last feature is especially useful in avoiding sending duplicates and allows you to focus on the issues that matter and are occurring at the moment.
Works with your smartphone through a mobile app. You can keep track of your social media campaign and engage with users at all times without needing a laptop or desktop. You can start using Hootsuite for free but you can only integrate 5 profiles and you will not be able to use the Team Member option. Hootsuite is also compatible with other software such as SalesForce, Zendesk, and Marketo.
Tool #3- Tribber
Tribber is a social blogging community that uses other social media outlets. You can search for a keyword and in the stream part will show you the latest posts that match your search. If you find something interesting or want others to know about it, you have the option of following the user and sharing the post. You can follow tribes that interest you called tribes. When you join a tribe you are just an observer and not an active participant. When you follow a tribe, that tribe’s members posts will automatically show up in your stream. You can share other people’s posts, engage with the tribe’s members, and comment on the posts. The Chief of the tribe can promote you to a full-fledged tribe member. This means that all of your posts will appear in full-fledged member’s stream and observer members as well. Those individual members will then have the option to share your posts with their followers, and this is where the true power of Triberr is shown. By creating and joining groups you can greatly increase your social media presence and reach.
For example, lets say you and your friends decide to make a tribe. All 5 of you have different amounts of Twitter followers but it averages out to about 175 Twitter followers each. The total amount of followers for the group would be 875 Twitter followers. This means that each of your posts could have a potential reach of 875 Twitter followers.
Another great feature that Triberr has is what it calls “Bonfires”. A Bonfire is basically a community forum where members can interact with other people outside of their tribe. You can ask questions, get the latest news about Triberr, and organize meetups.
If you are a successful or popular blogger, Triberr gives you another way to monetize that. You can participate in an “influencer marketing campaign”. Influence marketing is when companies or brands hire bloggers to promote their brand, product, or service. A familiar example of this is when brands hire celebrities to endorse their product. After the Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps was in what seemed almost every commercial. Brands where using his popularity and reach to influence a larger quantity of people than they normally could. As a brand ambassador you will be working with a campaign tribe and company for at least 4 weeks, expected to write 3-4 posts per month, and be compensated around $300/month. What makes Triberr unique and very effective is that every time you share a post, every member in your campaign tribe is forced to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc. Triberr is great for increasing traffic to your traffic, monetizing your blog, gaining social proof, and did I mention its FREE.
Tool #4- Bit.ly
Bit.ly was established in 2008 and became popular very quickly on Twitter after it became the default URL shortening service used. Bit.ly shortens over one billion links per month.
With Bit.ly you can also shorten branded domain names. This ensures that any sharing will include your branded domain name and promote your brand simultaneously. When your brand or company tweets a link of their latest news or product, you can brand that link.
Another feature is the ability to customize the second half of the link and optimize them for higher click through rates. You can educate your audience about the information they will get when they click on the link by customizing it. This way a user can decide if they are interested in your link or not based on the name. The more relevant the customized part of the link is to the information that the user thinks he will be getting, the higher the click through rate.
It has a real time media map ranks the most popular news sources in each state and displays real-time shares from those 40 publications on the map. You can select from 4 different media types including newspapers, TV and radio, magazines or online only. You can also select a specific state and see what news outlet is most popular in that state.
With all of this potential data that Bit.ly could potentially provide, the reporting and analytics makes everything easy to understand.
This is an example of what the analytic dashboard looks like.
It tells you the total amount of clicks, tells you which links have the most clicks on them and provides you with two additional graphs. The first is a Trend graph, which displays the number of links you have posted over the past 6 days, and also shows the amount of clicks corresponding to those 6 days. The other graph displays the Organic link activity for the past 6 days.
Another great feature that makes Bit.ly attractive for Internet marketers is its ability to integrate with other popular software and website content platform. This includes SalesForce, Hubspot and Sprout Social to name a few.
Tool #5- Feedly
Feedly is one of the best tools to keep track of your favorite blogs all in one place. You can search for sites and add them to your Feedly reading list. It will then display all of those sites recent blogs posts. You can click on the individual posts and in one click it will take you to the original website. This is especially useful is you are constantly reading the same blogs such as different marketing blogs. By posting useful and informative comments on other people’s blog, you can generate awareness to your own blog. Following the end of Google Reader, Feedly gained about 500,000 new followers in 48 hours.
Feedly lets you comment on different posts and interact with different communities. Its minimalistic design makes Feedly very aesthetically pleasing, which makes the overall experience that much better. You can organize your news feed in a text-only list or in a more visual way. You can choose the presentation style on your homepage by just clicking on the gear icon towards to top of the page. You can select text only, which looks similar to you typical email layout. You can also select a magazine presentation, which displays the default image set with the blog, and has a medium sized blurb under the image. You can also set it to card presentation, and it will display it like a card. It looks very similar to the magazine presentation option, except that the blurb is much more condensed.
Feedly is ideal for people who read the same blogs daily or are looking for a more organized blog reading experience.
Tool #6- Buffer
This social media tool that allows you to preset scheduling times. You can either post things in real time, or buffer them and have the application automatically post it at the next preset scheduled time. You can easily schedule what times and days your posts will go out. You don’t have to pick the days or times for each post, which allows you to focus on being more engaged with your social media audience. This also prevents having “bad posts” because you felt like you needed to post something. If you find something interesting you can add it to your buffer queue and avoid “bad posts”.
Making scheduled posts is easy with Buffer. This is from my recently created Buffer account.
Buffer also has this very unique feature that allows you to post by sending an email to a user unique specific address. You add the text you want posted in the subject line and then add any links in the message body.
They have also added a new feature that allows you to add tweets to your Buffer while using Twitter. It will also allow you to retweet the old way where you have the username and tweet in quotes. You can tweet the old school retweet right away or Buffer it. This will allow you to share things while giving credit to the original user who posted it, and will allow you to share other people’s viewpoints.
You can connect the following accounts with Buffer:
Facebook Pages
Facebook Profiles
Facebook Groups
Twitter
LinkedIn Profiles
LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Company Pages
App.net Profiles
Google+ Pages
The plans vary according to the number of different profiles you want, how many posts can be “buffered” at once, and the different analytical features you get. You can also combine Buffer with your bit.ly account and have your links automatically shorten and become trackable. Ideal for generating traffic through its unique scheduled posting capabilities.
Any tools you like? Share them below!