By Alexandra Jacopetti at Social Media Today:
In this noisy content marketing world, it can be a challenge to make your brand stand out from the crowd. With millions of free webinars and free trial this and free demo that, the overload can send anyone in a tailspin. Channel your inner Tim the Toolman Taylor and take some notes. Here are the tools to help catapult your brand to new heights.
Social
1- Track what tweets are most popular with Brook. The tool sends an email with the most popular tweets by a group of people that you set up. Create one around strategic partners or in your industry. Take some notes on the tweets; your tweet could soon show up on the list.
2- Photos on Facebook receive 70% more engagement when compared to status updates without photos. Compfight is a visual locater that searches Flickr for commercial use photos. Make your brand stand out from the crowd with this step up from Google Images.
3- Everyone is hashtag crazy these days. Tagboard monitors hashtags across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Vine. Content is showcased in custom boards that you create so you can monitor your own hashtag campaign, or listen in on what your customers are saying coupled with your hashtags.
4- Facebook Insights but for Instagram, Statigram calculates the statistics of your posted photos. Employ the ranking feature to see which kinds and types of photos get the most likes. The platform also analyzes follower growth and suggests posting times for optimizing engagement.
5- Effectively navigating through spam and fake accounts can take away from successfully networking on Twitter. Step in ManageFlitter: the tool helps manage your Twitter while growing quality followers. The list is sortable by influence, language, and whether or not users are following you back. The handy list is ideal for sorting out those that are listening to your tweets and those that aren’t. With a paid subscription, ManageFlitter schedules and posts tweets at optimized times, while monitoring keywords and hashtags.
6- One of the downfalls of Instagram for brands is the lack of analytics and ROI of posts. Thanks to Curalate, you don’t have to spend your time calculating likes and comments by hand. The tool, which also works for Pinterest, uses image algorithms with data technology and reports insights of your photos. Curalate also has community management capabilities that allow you to discover uncovered conversations about your brand.
Blog
1- Inkybee is an outreach tool that manages influencer outreach. Search for relevant blogs according to your niche with specific keywords. The beautifully organized report showcases results by engagement, audience size and the number of inbound links. Utilize this tool to spy on your competition, or for relationship outreach. Two blogs are better than one.
2- Writing an article, but don’t have the perfect source? Submit a posting with Help A Reporter Out and responses will begin flowing into your email box. Looking to become the front page of Time? Use the HARO emails to help other reporters out with their next big story.
3- Coined “The Little Black Book of Bloggers and Journalists,” BuzzStream is a dashboard tool that tracks and handles influencer outreach. Create your own list of influencers in your sphere of business for relationship building and guest blogger outreach. The platform fosters communication with these appointed influencers with outreach capabilities across their social media channels.
4- Connect your brand with bloggers with BlogDash. The tool allows users to search for content marketers based on target specifications such as demographic and influence. After connecting with a blogger, you can pitch them your new product or service to get others talking in the blogosphere.
5- The success of your blog post significantly depends on the intrigue and uniqueness of the blog post’s title. Take it from content marketing kings HubSpot to create a Blog Topic Generator. Simply enter 2-3 nouns about the subject you’re thinking of writing on, and the machine will crank out a few unique suggestions.
6- Did HubSpot’s generator not work in your favor? Switch over to everyone’s favorite, Google and utilize its Google Keyword Planner. Built originally for Google advertisements, the tool reports data of the searches inquiries of your given keyword. Operate this tool as your blog subject generator. The difference in search requests could be the difference in blog traffic.
Web
1- When you get to your office in the morning, how many tabs do you open to check the updates of your favorite websites? [I open around 8!] Feedly allows users to follow their favorite websites in one place. Utilize this tool to monitor your interests and keep up with industry trends, or to keep an eye on competitors. Feedly Pro is available for a monthly fee that offers Pocket, Evernote, and Hootsuite integration.
2- Pocket, a bookmark saving tool and app, allows you to ‘pocket’ content, which can be synced with your computer or tablet. Find a good article about why Kaepernick is a better quarterback than Wilson? Pocket it so you won’t forget such facts. [Did we mention we are 49er fanatics?]
3- Broken links are the best way to drive traffic away from your website and blog. Broken Link Checker is a tool that will go through your website and find any broken links. The quick 15 check up will save you a customer or two.
4- Love the theme of a website you just stumbled upon? WordPress’ Theme Detector will tell you which theme the website is decorated in and which plugins are employed.
SEO
1- One of the factors determining your Google results page ranking is the loading time of your website. Reduce the size of your images, but not the quality, with Smuch.it. This compression tool reduces the size of your images then you download the smaller version. No Photoshop needed!
2- Have you seen a spurt of website traffic but don’t know which social media channels or referral they came from? SqueezeCMM generates separate shortcut links based on different social media platforms. Enter a specific page or blog post you want to track and the tool will create different links for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and even email. These unique short codes will allow you to see exactly where traffic is coming from as a result of that link.
3- Incorporating internal and external links into your blog content is an unparalleled method for better search engine ranking results. RavenTools’ Site Finder points out high-ranking links for your link campaign. Enter a keyword, and it finds top ranking URLs for you to implement in your content.
The Kitchen Sink
1- Looking to spy on competitors’ blog post analytics? Social Crawlytics runs a crawl report of a website and tracks which content is shared on which social channels. This is a useful research tool to see what blog post topics are working and which aren’t. Apply this data to your own content calendar. Was a blog post about Twitter chats successful? Construct your own.
2- Forgot to follow up with a potential client? Boomerang allows Gmail users to schedule emails to be sent at a later date. The service also features an email clean up tool for important emails. Boomerang will archive important emails for a given time period, but then return it to your inbox at a later time so you don’t forget about it. Put this tool to use to communicate with clients in a different time zone, or schedule a Happy Birthday email to your boss. There’s nothing worse than forgetting her birthday!
3- Listen to what everyone is saying about you with Mention. The Google Analytics’ competitor tracks your mentions across all social media platforms, news channels, and blogs. Set up alerts to get these mention reports right to your inbox.
4- Another useful listening tool, Visible is an analytics and social media engagement dashboard for your brand. Although not as advanced as Mention, the insights serve as an extra pair of social media eyes.
5- Outreachr is perfect for expanding your brand’s list of contacts. The Beta platform gives you a list of contacts based around keywords. Their contact database also spreads over 20 different countries. Punteggio! [Italian for score!]
6- How many apps do you use on your smart phone or iPad each day? What if you could instruct some of them to work together to make your life easier? Enter, Zapier. This mouthpiece tool allows users to set “zaps” up so applications will work with other applications automatically. For example, you can have emails through Gmail be sent to Evernote as notes. You can set up MailChimp to retrieve emails from buyers each time you make a sale in your Etsy store. The tool fosters integration with over 200 applications, social media systems and platforms. The application combinations are endless.
If you did the math correctly, that was 25. I snuck a bonus tool in there! You are now fully equipped to take your brand to the next level.
Via Social Media Today.
