Social Media Tools - Social Media Tools For Internet Communication

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• published: 12 Dec 2015
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Social media is a wasteland of productivity. Marketers use social media to grow their businesses. Most, however, are wasting their time. I’m not saying social media is a bad marketing channel. In fact, as you’ve seen in the nutrition site case study, I use platforms such as Facebook to drive tons of quality traffic to my websites. Clearly, I’m not the only one. In 2014, 92% of marketers stated that they put a high value on social media as a marketing platform. Knowing that, it’s not surprising that 8 out of 10 small and medium sized businesses incorporate social media marketing into their growth strategy. What’s really great is that it works, at least to a small degree, for most businesses. According to one of the latest industry reports compiled by Social Media Examiner, 80% of marketers report that social media has increased website traffic for their businesses. As expected, there are other benefits. For example, 72% of marketers say social media helps them develop loyal fans. So when I’m talking about waste, I mean that although almost everyone uses social media for their businesses, very few do it efficiently. They spend a lot of time and resources and get back minimal results. You need to spend time optimizing your social media efforts. Once you do, you will save time and get better results in terms of engagement, traffic, and conversions. One of the fundamental ways to do tasks more efficiently is to use tools. There are hundreds of social media tools specifically designed to make the lives of social media marketers easier. I’ve put together a list of 17 of the best social media marketing tools. I’ve also highlighted the most important features and will show you how you can use them to improve your social media marketing. Share better content, and make it easier for yourself All social media platforms are unique, but a successful strategy often looks similar across most platforms. One component of that strategy is sharing content, which comprises both of your own content (to drive traffic to your website) and other great content in your niche (that’s interesting to followers). In order to be successful, you must have a consistent sharing strategy. These tools will help you do that. 1. Buffer Buffer is fairly well-known by now by social media marketers, but it still needs to be included in this list. If you have not tried it yet, you’re going to be blown away by how easy it makes posting regular content to your social media accounts. The idea behind Buffer is this: create a posting schedule for each of your social media accounts, all in one place. You can connect your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest accounts, and your Google+ pages. Then, you can add posts to your “queue” inside Buffer. Based on your settings, Buffer will automatically share posts from your queue to the social accounts you’ve chosen. Set up a free account, and connect a social media account. Once you’ve done so, click “Schedule.” You’ll be able to choose when you post and what days you post on. You can do this once and then never think about scheduling social posts again—a huge time saver. When you click the blue button at the bottom, your post will be added to your queue. When you click on your main content area, you’ll see your current queue as well as the times when your posts are scheduled to go out. You can drag around messages to change their order or edit them whenever you like. 1a. Bonus tool – Bulk Buffer: In some situations, you’ll have a list of great URLs or a whole bunch of posts that you would like to add to your Buffer queue all at once. Bulk Buffer allows you to upload a text or csv file with all these shares to your Buffer account all at once. Usually, with social bulk posting tools, you need to follow a complicated format with dates and other information, but since you already took care of that in Buffer, it’s much easier. All you need for this tool is a simple list. Put one message you want to share on each line, and wrap each line in quotation marks. For example, I could save the following three messages in a text file before uploading the file: “How to Write an Author Bio That Doesn’t Suck http://bit.ly/1JU6eoR My latest from @hubspot” “The Step-by-Step Guide to Fixing Any Google Penalty http://www.quicksprout.com/2015/08/05/the-step-by-step-guide-to-fixing-any-google-penalty/” “27 travel tips that even frequent fliers may not know http://ow.ly/QsS8i” Inside of Bulk Buffer, import your file where it gives you the option, then select the social account connected to Buffer where you would like to share the posts (you can select multiple).