When it comes to productivity with your social media marketing, I’ve found that there are many areas for improving your productivity. These include automation, scheduling, communicating, engaging, and more. Here are 25 social media tools recommended for you.
When I look for helpful productivity tools, I often grab ones that make a difference in one or more of these areas.
Each of these social media productivity tools I’ve highlighted below fits into one of these categories. Here’s hoping that a bit of help in each area can unlock some spare time for you.
Twibble
With Twibble, you can set up an RSS feed you want to publish automatically to your Twitter feed, complete with a featured image pulled directly from your article. And the fun doesn’t stop with images: You can edit the times that new posts go out, the frequency with which they’re sent, and the text and attribution on each. You could end up with something like this:
Twibble offers filters, too, in case you only want to post articles containing certain words (or want to exclude articles that contain certain words). You can wire up multiple feeds and track clicks and performance, too, all for free.
WeVideo
With WeVideo, you get worry-free cloud access to your media, Ken Burns-style animations, voiceover capabilities, and a library of licensed music to make video editing stress-free. Sharing capabilities include Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube.
Collaborating on your work should be a snap, especially if you and your team are spread out with travel or remote work. One way to keep a project in sync is with SiteDrop, a fun tool backed by the team behind Digg and Chartbeat.
SiteDrop syncs with a chosen DropBox folder pulls in all the files and photos from the folder and displays everything in a stream of information that you can easily share with teammates. Each file comes with its areas for likes and comments, and you can create as many different sets as you like, based on your DropBox folders.
SiteDrop pitches itself as a tool for project management, design, and photography, and I think there could be uses for coordinating content research, social media campaign ideas, and more.
Magisto
Magisto lets you synchronize audio and visual aspects to make an emotional connectionwith the viewer. Share your videos on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, or your blog.
IFTTT and Zapier
Two of our favorite automation tools— IFTTT and Zapier—can help you coordinate and automate your marketing efforts in a variety of fun, unique ways. We’ve written about 34 tips to wire up an IFTTT recipe for social media, and anything you can’t figure out with IFTTT, you can try with Zapier.
The former is a free service, the latter gives you your first five free and then switches to paid plans (Zapier has hundreds of connectable apps and services, compared to IFTTTs dozens).
Social media tools list.
Dailymotion
Live and on-demand, Dailymotion is the place to watch videos of sporting events, hilarious bloopers, fashion shows, and more.
Metacafe
With a youthful tone and appearance, Metacafe showcases short-form videos, gaming, television, and music.
AddThis
AddThis is an easy way to install those sharing and follow buttons you see all over the place, but their focus is on keeping people on your site and reducing bounce rates. They allow people to share your content and follow your social networks without leaving the page they’re on.
There are a ton of other ways you can use AddThis, such as implementing sharing buttons in newsletters, so it’s worth checking out.
Click to Tweet makes it quick and easy for readers to share your content, or pieces of content, to their Twitter followers by – you guessed it – click to tweet. You create your pre-written tweets and Click to Tweet provides a link that, when clicked, will open that tweet inside a user’s Twitter account.
It’s an easy way to eliminate the barrier of typing out a tweet for your readers to share it, and since you’re working with a link, you can use it however you want.
Playbuzz
Playbuzz is a digital publishing platform where you can create content and embed quizzes directly on your website. The goal is to share stories that people love, and it seems to be working.
Playbuzz is one of BuzzFeed’s biggest competitors. Just as with BuzzFeed, Playbuzz lets you share your content on practically every device and network.
Cyfe
Free social media tools.
Cyfe is an all-in-one business dashboard that makes it easy to monitor virtually every piece of analytic data about your business (really). Pre-built widgets pull data from popular services like Google and Salesforce.
Add your own custom widgets or Push API for integrating additional data. Boom: all the data you could ever need (and none you don’t), all in one place. Track brand mentions, Twitter followers, and Facebook demographics from the social media dashboard.
Automate client reporting with SEO, social media and advertising data from the client dashboard. Plus, there’s a web analytics dashboard, sales dashboard, project management dashboard, IT board and about every widget, you could ever need.
Piktochart
Piktochart lets you create innovative, design-intricate infographics complete with icons, images, charts, and interactive maps. Once finished, save and publish your newly minted content directly to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube, and even convert long-form infographics to multi-slide presentations on SlideShare.
Visme
With Visme, you can easily create beautiful presentations, infographics, reports, web content, and wireframes all in one place. Share your content online as a URL or on social media, embed it on your website, or download it for offline use.
Curalate
With 2.6 billion images shared each day and Instagram the de facto social media network for savvy Millennials, there’s no denying the power of visual content. Kick-start your visual brand management with Curalate.
Curalate applies image recognition algorithms to social media conversations and then scours social media sites including Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Facebook to find what people are saying about your brand in pictures.
Instantly see what people are visually sharing about your brand, collect and moderate fan photos for user generate content, push content to a fully customizable, shoppable image gallery, and schedule your images for posting on Pinterest and Instagram.
Social Rank
Social Rank is the easiest way to identify, organize, and manage your followers on Twitter and Instagram. Social Rank sorts your followers based on Most Valuable (highest profile followers), Most Engaged (frequency of retweets, mentions, and replies), Most Followed, and Best Followers (followers who have engaged most recently with you).
Add additional filters to find followers based on bio keywords, geographic locations, interests, and activity. Create custom lists for special engagement campaigns and find out who your competitors’ top followers are!
Typeform
I quite enjoy a survey that doesn’t feel like a survey. Those are exactly the type that TypeForm specializes in. Typeform surveys ask one question at a time; survey takers move through the survey chronologically via the smooth UI or keyboard shortcuts (e.g., press Enter to go to the next question).
Plus, you can add visual components to your questions, and that makes it even easier for those filling out your form.
Creating a new survey is a time saver as well. You simply drag and drop the types of questions you want to include, and you can set the color scheme, fonts, and images with just a couple of clicks.
And of course, TypeForm provides all the relevant analysis and data that you might need from the survey results.
Wideo
Wideo works in tandem with your marketing strategy to create videos in minutes. You can create professional videos online and share them on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. If you prefer to have Wideo create your video, graphic designers are on hand to assist with your marketing needs.
Vimeo
Vimeo’s platform is similar to YouTube and is ideal for video sharing, discovery, and sparking creativity. You can get inspired by individuals and businesses that are passionate about video.
BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed is one of the most popular quiz-sharing websites to date. The site’s editorial style makes it easy to create, view, and share quizzes. You can share your content on practically every device and network.
The bottom line
Don’t let what you know … limit what you can imagine or maybe even dream. Confidence never comes from having all the answers. It comes from being prepared for, and open to, new ideas and questions. Prepare your mind for new ways of thinking. Only then will you take advantage of all the business lessons learned.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Maya certainly has a firm grasp of the subject on social customer care, doesn’t she? Feelings and emotions are the keys to social customer care. And social customer care is really the key to your marketing campaigns … particularly word of mouth marketing. So you are getting the picture, right?
People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel..
– Maya Angelou
Social customer care is no longer an emerging trend to merely keep an eye on – it’s a burgeoning movement that companies would be very wise to embrace. Instead of returning to a store or calling a helpline, people are increasingly turning to social media to resolve their gripes. It is called social customer care.
Customer care and retention efforts are most effective when they’re proactive, not reactive. In other words, it’s much easier to set customers up for success than to frantically rescue at-risk customers later on. Proactive customer support involves providing your customer with the necessary resources to succeed right from day one, not just when things go wrong.
With everyone so focused on the very big and positive impact that social customer care can have on the customer experience, many companies fail to realize that social customer care can have just as big and positive an impact on the employee experience. And that alone multiplies the importance of social customer care to customer experience design.
The fact that approaches to social customer care can vary adds to this challenge. Some companies are using social channels to resolve customer concerns and questions publicly, while others prefer to take social feedback offline and route customers to phones or online chats. Some are investing in social-listening tools and vendors, while others are creating in-house social-care teams.
In the end, the biggest challenge is finding the right balance. That is would we will address today … steps to achieving the best in social customer care.
Here are 9 steps we recommend our clients take to achieve these goals of being best and balanced:
Select your channels
To select your best channels you must know who your customers are and do good research. Look at the data and study trends. This will help you determine what consumers are thinking and saying, what channels are most popular, and whether you have the resources to deal with issues.
The data you gather through social media monitoring can be a valuable source for customer insights. Lots of them that simply can’t be found elsewhere.
Empower your staff
Empower the social customer service team to act quickly. Make them feel completely supported. If you can’t trust them, then you have the wrong team.
Etiquette
Judge whether customers want your help and engagement before you jump in.
Prioritization
Define your social media engagement plans based on your objective priorities. And don’t make the mistake of underestimating the time required to do the job well.
Connect multiple channels
Conversations with customers will quickly spread between channels. Businesses need to be able to monitor across multiple channels.
Employ social media tools
By now you are probably very aware of how much time social media can consume. Social media tools are available to reduce the time requirements and improve your performance.
Choose your tools to combine an ability to both listen and engage.
Establish a listening program
Here you need to consider the terms you will monitor carefully. Pay particular attention to the mention of your brand and miscellaneous negative terms.
Over achieve expectations
Without an effective social media listening program in place, brands cannot hope to live up to customer expectations, let alone overachieve. Listen, interpret, and then act.
This is your time to create remarkable social customer care. With good continuity and persistence, you will be able to develop lasting relationships with your customers. Lead with initiative and own the moment. Dive in today and notice your business improvements build.
Remember this simple fact. Brands are verbs. What they do matters more than what they say. Let your actions be your difference-maker.
