12 Social Media Tools from Social Media Marketing World
Social Media Marketing World (run by the team at Social Media Examiner) is the largest and certainly one of the best social media conferences globally.
Over 2,300 people descend to San Diego for 2 days to meet and learn from fellow marketers.
I delivered a presentation at this event about 12 social media tools to help with social media marketing.
My focus was to help companies become more efficient and effective. In a recent survey by Social Media Examiner over 26% of marketers spend at least 6 to 10 hours a week on social media marketing. That’s a lot of time!
If you could get some of that time back you could focus on other areas of your business and generate more profit.
But always remember without a good strategy tools are not going to help you!
In the following, we discuss a problem and then give you some of the best social media marketing tools to solve that problem.
Here’s a study from Statista last year which shows average reach on Facebook going down to 6.2% for all brand pages and 2.1% for brand pages with more than 500k likes!
Implement a better sharing strategy with PostPlanner.
PostPlanner have just released a web based management tool for Facebook and Twitter.
There is some great functionality available with Postplanner that will help get your content seen:
Inboundwriter solves this problem.
When you have an idea for content add it to Inboundwriter and it will analyze it to tell you the following:
But if you want to grow your followers quicker you need to follow more people on Twitter.
ManageFlitter is a very useful tool for managing your Twitter account. One area of functionality that is particularly useful is their power mode.
You can run really advanced filters to find relevant people to follow and process them yourself or pay Manageflitter to process them for you!
The Manageflitter team will process these based on the maximum number of follows per day you have set.
This is important because Twitter doesn’t like it if you follow too many people at the same time!
When you create the filters you can save them and then re-run them at later stage.
You can also set up rules to unfollow people that haven’t followed you back!
As well as providing really useful analytics on your account it helps you find relevant people to follow.
For example, you can pick out a relevant post and get a list of the people that have engaged in the post or find people part of a shared circle.
There will be more options and apps available to sell on Social Media over the next couple of years.
One company that is making great progress in this area is Heyo with the launch of Heyocart.
With Heyocart you share a status update on on your Facebook business page and your fans can enter the word ‘buy’ to buy the product!
Directr iPhone App
This is a cool iPhone app that provides templates and directions for creating videos based on themes.
For example, if you wanted to create a video about a restaurant you can pick a storyboard and take pictures as requested. Directr will then compile the video for you.
You can add music and an intro and then you have a cool video ready to promote.
One of the most important things with a blog is being organized.
This is where an editorial calendar comes into play.
CoSchedule is an editorial calendar tool for WordPress. It provides you with a calendar, task management and even provides you with the capability to post your new blog post to social media when thy are ready!
It finds great content for us!
This is a great way of finding great content.
You are typically talking about single digit percentages (i.e. less than 10%). Your audience doesn’t see most of your content.
Sending a direct message to Twitter followers has a bad name because too many people send requests immediately after someone follows them.
But we have used Socialbro to created a highly filtered list of Twitter followers and then we send a personalised tweet providing something of value. This works!
When an update is in your stream from someone that regularly interacts with you Agorapulse highlights this person so you can respond to them.
They are categorized as Ambassadors, Engaged users or Influencers.
Schedule all your pins and analyse the results of all your activity and your competitors.
You can also filter based on categories of content so you can view, for example, the most popular content for a particular category.
An alternative to Uprise.io is Buzzsumo so worth checking this out also.
Over 2,300 people descend to San Diego for 2 days to meet and learn from fellow marketers.
I delivered a presentation at this event about 12 social media tools to help with social media marketing.
My focus was to help companies become more efficient and effective. In a recent survey by Social Media Examiner over 26% of marketers spend at least 6 to 10 hours a week on social media marketing. That’s a lot of time!
If you could get some of that time back you could focus on other areas of your business and generate more profit.
But always remember without a good strategy tools are not going to help you!
In the following, we discuss a problem and then give you some of the best social media marketing tools to solve that problem.
1. Most People Don’t See Your Content!
When you share out content on social media and most people don’t see it’s a real waste.Here’s a study from Statista last year which shows average reach on Facebook going down to 6.2% for all brand pages and 2.1% for brand pages with more than 500k likes!
Massive declines in organic reach
Implement a better sharing strategy with PostPlanner.
PostPlanner have just released a web based management tool for Facebook and Twitter.
There is some great functionality available with Postplanner that will help get your content seen:
- Specify the type of content that gets shared at different times – This is useful because you might find that images work better at certain times and text updates at other times.
- Re-send your content – Sharing your content out once is generally not enough. Postplanner lets you set up options for sharing your content multiple times. You add it to a queue and specify when and how often you want your content shared.
- Content discovery engine – You can find the most shared pieces of content (text and images) related to your niche and then reshare the most relevant content. If content has already been proven to be popular it is likely that it will be popular for you.
Define your posting schedule
2. Not Sure Which Posts Will Rank on Google
It’s normal that around 20% of your blog content will deliver you 80% of your traffic. A lot of blog posts you write get some initial traffic but then get very little organic traffic from search engines after they are initially published.Inboundwriter solves this problem.
When you have an idea for content add it to Inboundwriter and it will analyze it to tell you the following:
- The chances of this ranking well on Google
- Related keyword terms that should be included in the post if you write based on this topic
- The important words that need to be in your title
- How competitive it will be to rank
Take the guess work out of creating content
3. Twitter Followers Not Growing Quick Enough
If you deliver great content to your audience on Twitter your followers will grow.But if you want to grow your followers quicker you need to follow more people on Twitter.
ManageFlitter is a very useful tool for managing your Twitter account. One area of functionality that is particularly useful is their power mode.
You can run really advanced filters to find relevant people to follow and process them yourself or pay Manageflitter to process them for you!
Apply and save filters
This is important because Twitter doesn’t like it if you follow too many people at the same time!
When you create the filters you can save them and then re-run them at later stage.
You can also set up rules to unfollow people that haven’t followed you back!
4. Not Enough Followers on Google+
If you want to build your followers on Google+ Circlescope is a really useful tool.As well as providing really useful analytics on your account it helps you find relevant people to follow.
Apply filters to find people to follow
5. Not Selling on Social Media
We talk a lot about engagement on Social Media but what about selling on Social Media?There will be more options and apps available to sell on Social Media over the next couple of years.
One company that is making great progress in this area is Heyo with the launch of Heyocart.
With Heyocart you share a status update on on your Facebook business page and your fans can enter the word ‘buy’ to buy the product!
Fans just enter BUY in a comment and HeyoCart takes care of the payment
6. Difficult to Produce Video
We all know that video is becoming increasingly important but we are put off video because of the time to create it.Directr iPhone App
This is a cool iPhone app that provides templates and directions for creating videos based on themes.
For example, if you wanted to create a video about a restaurant you can pick a storyboard and take pictures as requested. Directr will then compile the video for you.
You can add music and an intro and then you have a cool video ready to promote.
7. Blogging Takes Too Much Time
It’s very difficult to be successful on social media without having a blog but a blog can be very time consuming.One of the most important things with a blog is being organized.
This is where an editorial calendar comes into play.
CoSchedule is an editorial calendar tool for WordPress. It provides you with a calendar, task management and even provides you with the capability to post your new blog post to social media when thy are ready!
8&9 Can’t Find Great Content to Share
We are overloaded with content and it’s difficult to filter it to find the best content. These 2 tools can help:Contentgems
ContentGems monitors a broad range of online sources (blogs, news, social media) and filters content based on keywords, social signals and other.It finds great content for us!
Nuzzel
Nuzzel connects to your Twitter and Facebook accounts and shows you the content that is being shared the most by your friends.
Find out what your friends are sharing
This is a great way of finding great content.
10. Difficult to Reach Your Twitter Audience
When you sent a tweet out to your audience what is the percentage of your audience online when you send it? and how many people actually see the tweet?You are typically talking about single digit percentages (i.e. less than 10%). Your audience doesn’t see most of your content.
Sending a direct message to Twitter followers has a bad name because too many people send requests immediately after someone follows them.
But we have used Socialbro to created a highly filtered list of Twitter followers and then we send a personalised tweet providing something of value. This works!
Agorapulse Twitter Functionality
Agorapulse is a Twitter and Facebook management tool and it has some really useful functionality to help you reach your ideal audience on Twitter.When an update is in your stream from someone that regularly interacts with you Agorapulse highlights this person so you can respond to them.
They are categorized as Ambassadors, Engaged users or Influencers.
Helps pinpoint your most engaged users who you should be following
11. Need to Manage Pinterest Better
Tailwind is an excellent tool for analytics on Pinterest and also for scheduling content.Schedule all your pins and analyse the results of all your activity and your competitors.
Compare the volume of pinning from a competitor’s website to yours.
12. Not Tracking My Competitors
Uprise.io is a really interesting content research tool. You can enter in your competitors website and get a detailed list of all their blog content showing you the number of shares on each piece of content.You can also filter based on categories of content so you can view, for example, the most popular content for a particular category.
An alternative to Uprise.io is Buzzsumo so worth checking this out also.