Spending hours learning how to implement the smallest improvements on your social media performance is my biggest source of frustration. Hands down the biggest for me.
You probably understand how important it is to give your visitors a great reader experience.
And to do that, you need to optimize many areas of your social media as well as your blog.
I love to read, learn, and try new things. Like new apps for my smartphone and iPad. Often, I’ll see something that I want to try, save, and connect with other new apps I am using.
Ideas that come from previously unconnected planes of thought.
There are many apps for workers looking to improve social media performance that can be a big help in this regard. And less wasted time? Yes, very good for that also.
Related: 12 Extraordinary Graphic Design Tools You Should be Using
Ponder for a moment … the iPad, Cloud computing, and Apps. A few years ago, they barely existed. Now they’re an integral part of our lives. That swift journey from nonexistent to indispensable seems to happen a lot these days.
But it gives us unlimited access to improve our learning and utility for things like through apps and idea connection.
This makes you think: What social media apps were you not using two years ago that today you can’t imagine living without today?
Here are my favorite of these very essential apps. They will help you either create content faster or create content that wasn’t possible before.
Snov.io is the perfect all-in-one cold outreach automation platform you never realized you needed. With it, organizing your cold email campaign is streamlined to the max.
Snov.io Email Finder will find prospects’ emails on any website or a professional network in seconds – all you have to do is simply add them to the list. An inbuilt email verifier tool checks the emails for validity to boost the delivery rate.
Once your list is ready, it takes only a few minutes to create your first automated email campaign with triggered follow-ups. Snov.io’s Cold Email Sender with a drag-and-drop campaign builder lets you add triggers, delays, goals, and create personalized emails right in the campaign builder. You can watch the campaign statistics in real time: open, click, and reply rates are presented as nice visuals with percentages.
And for email marketers who want to pay special attention to specific clients and know exactly which ones are interested, Snov.io offers an Email Tracker – a forever free browser extension that doesn’t add any signatures, links or logos in the email body, and integrates seamlessly into your Gmail to help you monitor email opens and link clicks. A reminder feature has just been released with the latest update.
Buffer has been one of the first social media marketing tools we have been using on a regular basis and it kind of stuck with us.
Buffer simply is awesome for scheduling tweets. And it has a free version that allows you to schedule up to ten tweets – that will get you far especially when you are just starting out on Twitter.
Buffer can also schedule posts for Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I rarely use this function, however.
Either there are better ways for me to schedule posts for these networks, or I do not use a scheduling tool for them at all.
But for scheduling on Twitter, Buffer is simply the best there is. Also, take a look at the analytics part of Buffer which is great if you want to test headlines or tweet images.
Another one of those simple design tools is Pablo.
This one is made by the same people behind Buffer. Pablo is extremely simple to use but focuses especially on social media images.
However, there’s no reason why you can’t use these in your blog posts as well.
Having images optimized for being shared on social media sites will increase the re-shares and, consequently, the traffic you’ll get.
On the right side menu, you have three sizes of images to choose from. For a blog post, you’ll probably want the “wide” picture or the square one:
Pick the size that corresponds with the image size used within your most important social network. This will change the size of the canvas in the middle.
Next, you’ll want to pick a background from the left side menu:
Finally, you can click the default text and type whatever you’d like.
Social media performance … Canva
Canva is my go-to tool when it comes to creating images for my online marketing. I am a design-moron. I admit it. When I started creating images for Pinterest, Facebook, and co. the first attempts simply were ugly.
And then I discovered Canva and the design templates they provide for free. And I learned a lot from them: About combining different color schemes, typefaces, and images.
Canva sets you up with the right dimensions for many different purposes like Pinterest posts, Facebook adds or Twitter headers.
They provide a couple of templates, some free, some for a fee. You can use a ton of elements in your design process and play around with filters.
The free account of Canva gets you far, if you need more templates or elements for your designs, you can pay for each element as you need them.
If you need more features, the Canva for work option may be for you.
If you need something to get started with designing graphics, you must try Canva’s design school, also free.
ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter is easily the best tool I know for managing your Twitter following. You can find accounts to follow; they help you find accounts you should unfollow.
ManageFlitter is the best tool to use in the follow-unfollow routine and help you grow a targeted audience.
One way to make your content a little bit more exciting is by including gifs.
Giphy is a search engine specifically for gifs (like Google is for
web pages). You can type in any broad term and get many gifs as a result.
If you like one and would like to include it in your post, scroll down to the “share” section, and copy and paste the embed code into your post’s HTML tab:
Don’t go crazy with gifs, but one or two now and then can make your audience smile and enjoy the content a bit more.
Here’s another page speed tool, but it’s a bit simpler than most.
It should be used as a starting point, and then you can dig in further with other tools if need be.
Page speed is one of the confirmed ranking factors in Google. They care a lot about user experience, which is why they made this tool in the first place.
Again, enter your URL into the tool. It could be your homepage or a post:
It will quickly give you an overall score, not just for desktop users but for mobile users as well.
If you get 80 and above, you’re doing okay.
It will show the biggest issues (red – bad!; orange – not as bad) that you should address to improve your page loading speed.
More importantly, it also has a “show how to fix” link under each issue, so you get a little guidance to walk you through the solution.
This tool was designed specifically for content marketers. It has a modern design, and it’s pretty intuitive to use.
There are three main functions, which are clearly laid out at the top of each project.
By scanning a post, the tool will compile a list of relevant contacts you could promote it to.
Then, it will find just about anyone’s email address.
The bottom line
Social media gives us a great opportunity to listen in on what people are saying. We’ve long known that word of mouth is incredibly powerful, now we can actually track it. Social listening tools are still somewhat primitive, but they are improving quickly and are already being deployed to help monitor conventional marketing efforts in real time.
Making your blog the best it can be takes a ton of work, but tools can help you accomplish it faster and easier.
I recommend you start by trying a handful of these tools at a time until you find the ones you have the most success with.
I realize that there are many other great tools out there. Share them in a comment below if I forgot the one that you love.
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Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
