Jennifer Hanford
Without a doubt, the right social media tool or tools can truly become a marketer’s best friend. The only problem? There are so many to choose from! If you’re prone to “Shiny Object Syndrome,” you may end up wasting more time trying out social media tools rather than saving time with them.
Luckily, many marketers, who are out there in the trenches every day, continuously test and use dozens of these social media tools. Through trial and error, they discover what works for them, their businesses, and their clients. Although there are no one-size-fits-all solutions out there, you can easily read others’ reviews and get ideas about what might work for you and your business.
In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’ve done a little research to find out which social media tools three well-known marketers are thankful for. (Note: These are from previous articles, so I cannot guarantee they are currently these marketers’ absolute favorites.)
I use Buffer for scheduling and sharing my posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google + throughout the day, at the optimal times.
JH: Buffer is currently a favorite social media tools for many marketers. Not only does the tool allow marketers to easily schedule multiple posts for multiple accounts, but it also suggests content for them. Buffer offers a free version, but the paid subscriptions are incredibly affordable as well. It’s one of my favorites, too.
Bonus: Buffer has fabulous customer service.
Like most marketing professionals, I have several Google Alerts set up for my name, my company name, and topics of interest to me. This is invaluable for finding bloggers that have linked to my posts, so I can go to their blog and thank you in the comments – a practice I highly recommend.
JH: Setting up Google Alerts to monitor the Internet for your clients is also a great idea. It helps you (the marketer) keep up with their current events as well; this is often useful information to post on their social media channels.
This has quickly become my go-to daily social media monitoring tool. Never again will you miss a conversation or an important message requiring a response.
JH: There are many reasons to love Communi.it, especially if you’re active on Twitter:
- FREE Twitter Analytics
- Better Manage Your Twitter Relationships
- Manage multiple profiles and team members
- Manage multiple profiles
- Who to un/follow, what content to Tweet
- Schedule tweets and much more!
Bonus: Commun.it offers a 14-day free trial.
Rather than tweeting out the same blog title everyone else is, use Save Publishing to grab quotes within the article that can be turned into a quick tweet, Facebook or Google+ post.
JH: This tool gives you a bookmarklet that does the “heavy lifting” for you, at least in regards to finding the “tweetable” sentences within articles.
Bonus: It’s free.
A fantastic free online tool to manage multiple social media profiles, pre-schedule updates for specific days and times, monitor keywords and analyze statistics. Plus, check and reply to saved searches, Twitter Lists, @ mentions, Direct Mentions and more.
JH: HootSuite is my personal go-to for managing social media, especially my Twitter accounts. The free version offers plenty of monitoring and scheduling capabilities for multiple accounts, and works well for a small client base. The paid version works well for marketers who handle larger volumes of accounts and/or content for their clients.
Easily manage your Twitter following, unfollow inactive accounts, find out who isn’t following you back and more. There are many ways to sort including by profiles with no images, inactive, no bio and more. Free and paid versions available. This is such a fun tool to use and very effective. I haven’t found anything like it out there.
JH: This is another excellent tool for marketers who are very active on Twitter. ManageFlitter has one feature which looks really cool: “PowerPost.” It’s a scheduling option, but it also lets you determine the best times to post tweets from your account(s) for the best possible exposure.
Over to You
So many tools, so little time. Do you use social media tools as part of your marketing? I’d love to hear more about which ones work for you. Please feel free to leave a comment below.
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