7 useful Social Media Tools

IFTTT social media tool

Too busy to tweet, post and update? You need these useful social media tools.

The world of social media marketing is a complex minefield that can engulf significant amounts of time without careful planning. To manage the process there are some tools you should know about.These tools will help manage your social media effort, save you time and, in the long run, money.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the longest establish tools on social media. This is the social media tool to get first, thanks to its wide range of uses, affordable pricing structure and accessibility. Hootsuite is invaluable for measuring the success of your social media campaigns, checking brand mentions and managing your posts. You can start for free, but the Pro version starts from just £6.99 a month which allows you to add more social media networks and a team member.

2. Buffer

If you keep forgetting to send out tweets then Buffer could be the answer. Use it to schedule your social media posts at the start of the day and @Buffer will take care of the rest, spacing out your Facebook posts, tweets and more during the course of the day so they look active and also have a better chance of catching everybody’s attention, as different people are active at different times.

It also allows you to schedule evergreen content in advance, so if you know you’ll be at an exhibition or conference and without much time to update Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, you can prepare and schedule key content blocks.

3. IFTTT 

It’s a strange name that stands for IF This Then That. It blends seamlessly with both Buffer and Hootsuite and links your accounts and sends out a tweet when you enter a blog post, or posts a link of Facebook when you post on LinkedIn.

It can even send you an email every time one of your favourite sources of retweets posts something new, so it takes a lot of the repetitive work and research off your hands. IFTTT is based on a series of recipes. You can create your own recipes, you can use other peoples and it’s a free tool. Here are some examples of recipes others have created:
IFTTT recipe examples

4. Tweetdeck

All the serious Twitter users have Tweetdeck on their desktop or, increasingly, their phone. Now owned by Twitter, Tweetdeck organises one or more Twitter accounts and puts all the conversations in one place, so you can engage with your followers and respond to direct messages as they come in.

5. Social Rank

Social Rank, like other online credibility tools, groups your most engaged and valuable followers together. You need to connect via Twitter and share your email address to generate the report.

Using this I discovered that UK politician @Ed_Miliband was following me :)


socialrank follower list
Knowing this means you know who to interact with, who will keep a conversation going and make your pages look active. This will help you increase the size of your community.

6. Tweriod 

When you tweet, it’s useful to know how well different content formats work. Tweriod goes beyond the basic views and tells you when engagement peaks, which will tell you when you need to post your next update.

When you register, it takes a while for the site to conduct the analysis and it sends a direct message (DM) when your report is ready. The free version allows one analysis per month. It’s fairly basic as you can see below, the aim to to encourage you to design up for a paid version. It’s a useful starting point.
tweriod

7. Social mention 

Find out who is talking about you with this simple social media listening tool that will help you track any conversation that includes your brand. It’s useful for the good times, and the bad, and when you know where people are discussing your company, you can join in and win more business.

Social Mention is free and sometimes clunky, but it’s a great place to start analysing online sentiment, whether good or bad. It’s also a useful place to check out a hashtag to see if it’s been badly used, before your company adopts it!



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