8 Indispensable Tools to Improve Your Social Media Efficiency
Nov 1st
By {grow} Community Member Ian Cleary
Being organized with your social media efforts is essential because it can be so time consuming.
It’s easy to spend many hours on social media but are you using that time effectively?
Here are 8 tools that I use on a regular basis that helped me be more effective and efficient on social media and hopefully it will help you too!
1. Monitor and Build Relationships on Twitter with Commun.it
Commun.it provides functionality to help build and monitor relationships with Twitter followers. I only need to spend a couple of minutes a day on Commun.it but it gives me some valuable actionable information, such as:
- Influencers who have interacted with me but I haven’t reciprocated.
- Suggested people to follow
- Opportunities to engage with people based on keywords that I’m tracking (e.g. my company name
- Identify people who are sharing my content that I should reciprocate by sharing their content
Figure 1 Influencers Sharing out My Content that I should engage with
2. Market Your Content Using Triberr
Triberr is a community of bloggers who help promote each other’s content by sharing it out on social networks.
Members join tribes and these tribes are based around particular topics and values. There is a high value placed on supporting fellow bloggers and providing value!
When you login you can see all the latest posts from tribe members and then you can easily share it out across a variety of networks.
In the example below there is an article from Jim Dougherty that has been shared out 11 times so far. When I read the article I just click on the approve button to share out on Twitter if I think my audience would benefit from the article.
If you join the right tribe it can be a great source of content to share and you can learn a lot from your community members.
3. Track the Influencer Blogs Using Google Reader
Google Reader is a useful tool for reading blog posts from many bloggers in one place instead of visiting individual websites. If you’re organized enough using Google Reader you can get through a lot of content quite quickly.
One great tip I picked up from Kristi Hynes was to use the Twitter name as the name of your blog feed. This means that when you read a piece of content that you want to share, you immediately have the Twitter name ready so you don’t have to look it up.
How many times have you searched around for a Twitter user name before you can share out some content?
4. Find Great Content Using Bottlenose
Bottlenose is a tool for tracking news and trends across social networks. I’m passionate about “social media tools” so I like to track conversations about tools on social networks. Bottlenose provides me with relevant information on this topic.
I can filter out information based on a topic I’m interested in and see the latest news related to that topic, tweets and trending topics related to that area on Twitter.
5. Tidy Up Using ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter helps you identify people to follow and unfollow and provides analytics on your account.
I mainly use the unfollow functionality. It can identify people you are following who are not following you back and then categorize them so you can identify the obvious ones to unfollow. For example:
- Followers tweeting in a language not native to you
- People who follow a lot of people but don’t get many followers
- People who are not active on Twitter
- People who are tweeting too much
6. Share Content With BufferApp
BufferApp provides a very easy way to share content in the most effective way. When you come across an interesting article you click on the ‘buffer’ button in your browser and a tweet is created and put into a queue.
It then goes out on the next available time slot which you set up.
This is very useful because I may come across 10 articles at one time worth sharing but there’s no point in sharing them all at the same time. Also, it may not be the most appropriate time to share it out.
One tip I got from my friend Nate Riggs is to use Socialflow to work out the best times to send out a tweet. So Bufferapp with Socialflow is a great combination!
7. Analyze Results Using Google Analytics
After all our social media activity we generally want to drive relevant traffic to our website. Google Analytics provides very relevant information related to this:
- Social Traffic- Google provides me details on where traffic is coming from
- Goals- When traffic does arrive from social media channels I want to track this to see what conversion I’m getting. It’s great getting traffic but if it’s not converting then we’re wasting our time. Tracking goals is a very quick way of seeing if we’re making progress.
8. Launch It All Using Bookmarks!
I don’t like to spend my day opening and closing all these applications. So a very simple tip is to bookmark all the tools in one folder and then you can open them up in one go!!!
Bookmarking is available with all browsers and it’s a simple way of keeping track of websites that you want to visit again.
By putting the bookmarks into a folder I can open them all in one go. On Safari this creates a tab for every application.
I’m always looking for useful new ideas and apps? Will you share your favorite in the comment section?
Ian Cleary is a Social Media Tools Specialist. He is the founder of Razorsocial, a website that provides sharp insights on social media tools. Follow Ian on twitter @ianmcleary
Five unexpected benefits of blogging
Sep 4th
I generally focus on the business benefits of social media but a recent conversation with my friend (and uber blogger) Jeff Bullas revealed that we had both received benefits from blogging that reached beyond mere dollars and cents. For both of us, blogging had changed our lives in some unexpected ways.
To provide some balance to the discussion, I thought I would feature some of the benefits that we don’t often talk about on our blog posts:
Blogging heals
… and by this I mean literally physically and psychologically heals. I discovered that both Jeff and I had started to blog at the same time following tragedies in our lives. During this difficult time, blogging allowed me to connect with people in ways that lifted me out of the darkness. And I found that the act of blogging lowered my blood pressure during a very stressful period. Writing every day was an important part of healing both my mind and body.
Blogging connects
Jon Buscall, a very tall bloke, and I in Stockholm.
I am not the kind of person who has dozens of friends. I have few close friends that I have held onto through the years. Yet so many people on the blog have have become legitimate, close friends in such a short period of time. And not just “Facebook friends” but “come over for dinner friends.” When I visited Sweden, Jon Buscall was there to greet me and show me around his lovely city of Stockholm. When I landed in Estonia, Kimmo Linkama took the day off to show me around this beautiful country. And when I visit Ireland this month, Ian Cleary will be organizing a celebratory Tweet-up with my new friends in Dublin. How would this have ever happened without blogging?
Blogging defines
Where do you stand on issues in the industry? Is Facebook on the decline or on the rise? What is the best way to measure the success of social media programs? What does Google + need to do to break-out? How do you integrate social media with traditional media? How do small businesses find the time to create meaningful content for the web?
Blogging helps you think through these topics and help clarify your — and your business’s positions — on vital industry topics. Blogging gets my mind organized.
Blogging teaches
And by this I mean, it teaches ME. Here’s a secret. I rarely have the answers. But I do have some good questions! Many of my blog posts are incomplete. I may be thinking about an idea or a theory that I’m not sure about. So I’ll throw something out there and let the community hash it out. I learn something from the community every day and I’ve incorporated these learnings into my classroom teaching, future blog posts, and even my books.
Blogging Inspires
{grow} regular Billy Delaney speaking at Social Slam 2012
Two years ago, we had our first Social Slam conference in Knoxville, TN. It was basically a gathering of the {grow} community and hundreds of the people who have come to know each other through the blog made the pilgrimage. They came from every corner of the country and overcame many difficulties to get here. They wanted to meet each other, these new connections and friends. I’ve had a great career but this was a real highlight. In inspires me to see a blog as a force that brings people together in a small but meaningful way.
I know this isn’t the kind of blog post you can take to your boss and say, “see, we should do this too!” But I did want to show that from a personal side, there are other benefits that you might not read about in the business blogging books.
What about you? What do you get out of your personal blogging?
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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