It just ain’t true.
Although you’ve heard it a thousand times, the facts speak for themselves.
When I was young they taught me that humans were the only animals capable of using tools.
However, dolphins, crows, chimpanzees, gorillas and t
more than six other species of wildlife have been observed using and building tools to help them achieve their goals.
Nevertheless, for the moment no one has observed any non-human animals (except perhaps a couple of politicians who I won’t name) using tools to advance their social media marketing.
For this reason, my goal with this post is to help marketers and business owners increase their social ROI by deploying the best social media tools available.
To accomplish this we need to get two things straight:
- These tools will allow you to achieve more with less effort, but they aren’t magic wands. Automation is only helpful if you maintain the human touch, as well.
- You won’t increase your ROI if you don’t have in place clear and measurable goals.
Having said that, here’s what these tools will help you do:
- Increase your number of followers.
- Drive more traffic to your content.
- Engage and interact with your audience on a daily basis.
So, let’s get started.
Buffer - http://4ui.us/nvc7 - Awesome post scheduling
Social media can be addictive.
As the parent of a teenager, I am well aware of how tight the smartphone, app and social media bond can be.
But here’s the question...
Do you really want to invest chunks of your time throughout the day to promoting your business’s social media?
If not, Buffer allows you to setup a schedule for your posts so that you can have a constant presence without having to actually be connected at all times.
Thanks to the fact that Buffer integrates with many different networks and tools you can easily “fill your buffer” with content and then know that it will be dripped out to your profiles in an orderly way.
Buffer works with Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest.
Commun.it - Powerful Audience Engagement - http://4ui.co/gws8
The essential ingredient.
Just like the “ñora” is the key ingredient to a great paella, a personal human touch is the most important element of a successful social media marketing campaign.
By definition, there has to be an engaged human voice.
Otherwise, you’re just spamming your audience.
Commun.it makes engaging with your audience much easier.
Not only does it effectively separate the “noise” from the actual conversation, but it gives you the semi-automized tools to efficiently engage your audience without having to invest significant amounts of time.
Commun.it works in conjunction with Buffer and is primarily a twitter tool that also works with facebook.
SocialOomph - Consistent Content Promotion - http://34.gs/37p9
It’s not the flashiest tool on the market.
In fact, it might just earn a designer’s onion award.
However, SocialOomph works like a gem.
Personally, I use SocialOomph primarily for one specific purpose - content promotion.
You see, creating great content isn’t easy.
It takes time, effort and resources to do it right, and after pouring all that into a new piece of content, you need to be sure to get your money’s worth by generating traffic.
That’s where SocialOomph’s content reservoirs come in.
Think about them like buckets with a hose in the bottom.
Each bucket connects to a specific set of social media channels and has it’s own personalized schedule. (In this sense it’s a little like Buffer).
However, here’s where the magic occurs.
Once SocialOomph publishes a piece of content to one of your channels it takes it and places it back in the bucket at the top. That way, you can continuously cycle through your best pieces of content generating a never-ending stream of traffic.
Cool, right?
However, if you’re on your game - you’ll have spotted the problem!
Repeating the same tweets/posts over and over again is not only boring but violates most networks’ terms of service.
Fortunately, SocialOomph has your back here too!
Utilizing a specify syntax (called spintax) you can set up multiple variations of your posts so that when they repeat they’re always different!
SocialOomph has more functionality than just this (It will help you find new followers, etc.) but this is for me the key functionality that makes it one of my selected tools.
ClickMeter - First Class Tracking and Measuring - http://34.gs/gh3u
If you’re not measuring you’re wasting your time.
Social Media marketing is just a silly little hobby if you’re not actively measuring your activity and results.
After all, knowing what works (and what doesn’t) is the only way you can improve over time.
So here’s the deal...
Have you ever noticed how god-awfully complicated Google analytics is? Have you ever met someone who has really gained meaningful insight using it?
Unless you have a high-level mathematics degree (I do, but that’s another story) you probably just look at your traffic and call it a day.
This is not a sufficient strategy - and that’s where ClickMeter comes in.
ClickMeter is simply a great, easy-to-use tracking/measuring tool.
You create a new tracking link and then share that link on social media.
That way you always have a clear picture of which links are producing and which are duds.
ClickMeter also allows you to add a tracking pixel to your site so that you can get an overall view of your traffic as well as measure where your conversions are coming from.
There you have it.
These are the five best tools that I use in my digital marketing business every day.
However, one thing we haven’t touched on is how to go about finding the right influencers to interact with on social media.
After all, as you grow your following you want to do it in an intelligent targeted fashion, right?
For this, you need to be able to orchestrate a smart social media discovery process.
If that’s something you’re interested in click here to download my special report “The 3 Best Social Media Influencer Mapping Tools”.