23 Dec 5 Tools to Kickstart Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Let’s be honest from the outset; social media marketing can be massive drain on resources.
To succeed in social media you need to continually post high-value content that engages your audience, network with influencers and respond to comments.
Finding and sharing content, plus interacting with others, can take up hours of your life every day.
Fortunately, however, it doesn’t have to.
Get the right “tool stack” and you’ll find that plenty of the “hard graft” can be completed in next to no time. After years of helping our clients with their social media marketing needs, testing out dozens of tools, today we’d like to discuss some of our “must have” tools for making your social media marketing easier, quicker and more effective.
Hootsuite
One of the key problems with social media can be missing out on important communications. Once you’ve followed more than a few people on Twitter, for example, your Twitter feed can become an unintelligible and never-ending stream of tweets.
When you consider that 72% of people who complain on Twitter expect a response within an hour. 32% of people expect a reply within 30 minutes, so missing one of those critical tweets can quickly spiral into something far less pleasant.
How do you make sense of all this data, cut through the “white noise” and keep tabs on those messages that really count?
The answer, in our experience, is Hootsuite.
Simply connect your social media profiles and you’ll find all those tweets, Facebook updates and Google Plus shares all filter into one tidy little tool.
Even better, you can begin to “prune” your Twitter feed, using Hootsuite to look specifically at mentions, direct messages or lists of influencers you want to target.
Buffer
A critical part of social media marketing is it’s “always on” nature. That means you need to be sharing content and insights on a regular basis, rather than simply logging in once a week to add a single tweet or Facebook update.
But realistically who has the time to be sat there religiously posting all day long?
Just as importantly, how do you know when most of your followers are going to be online?
With 500 million tweets and 4.75 billion Facebook status updates posted per day you better be sure you’re posting when you stand the greatest chance of being seen in amongst all that noise.
This is where Buffer comes in handy. Simply queue up your social media content in advance and trust Buffer to post it at the most appropriate times for maximum engagement.
Just as usefully, Buffer users can easily view actionable analytics about the success of their content. Use the data provided to find topics and social media post types that particularly resonate with your audience. Then use these insights to provide future direction for your content creation.
Tailwind
Tailwind is to Pinterest marketers what Buffer is to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus. Don’t think Pinterest is a major concern right now? As of September 2015 Pinterest boasted 100 million active users, meaning that whether you’re selling products from an ecommerce store or writing blog posts Pinterest represents a massive opportunity to grow your traffic.
As with Buffer, queue up your content in advance with Tailwind, and trust the tool to carefully share the content at the most appropriate time. Additionally, use the statistics provided to improve your marketing, by discovering exactly what is working for your audience.
Triberr
Want more visitors from Twitter? If so, consider grabbing a free subscription to Triberr. This tool collects similar Twitter accounts into collaborative groups who share each other’s content. Suddenly you can have dozens of other people sharing your content on social media, rather than simply relying on just your account to garner traffic.
Having a Triberr membership also means that you have a constant supply of fresh content that you can pick and choose between, making it easy to keep your feeds full of juicy new content.
PostPlanner
PostPlanner is like x-ray specs for social media. Simply type in a keyword phrase and PostPlanner will reveal the top-performing recent content on the subject – from thousands of accounts that they track.
Simply select those top-performing posts and re-share them with your own audience, confident that these “battle-tested” posts have already been proven to perform.
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