It appears that Ian Cleary is the King of Social Media tools. With new social media marketing tools coming on the market just about every day, Ian is one of the people you can rely on to test them all – from free to paid.
We’re thrilled that he shared his knowledge of tools with us at Social Media Marketing World this year and now I’ll share them with you.
Tools to Target the Right People
As Ian says, don’t sell hot dogs at a vegetarian conference. You have to know your audience before you can market to them successfully. The social tools below will help you identify and engage with active fans, influencers, and industry relevant people to follow.
- Tactics Cloud is a free tool that allows you to target Twitter followers and find relevant people on Twitter. The tool allows you to search for Twitter users by keyword, location and followers.
- Lead Social is a paid social tool that measures your Facebook ROI. The tool actually assigns a monetary value to your posts and Facebook ads in order to determine much value you’re getting from your posts Facebook posts. The tool also highlights who’s interacting with your Facebook content the most.
- Little Bird helps you find influential people in your target industry. Use this tool to identify influencers that you want to build relationships with. The tool also shows you relevant people who aren’t following you so that you can start engaging and building relationships them.
- GroupHigh is a paid tool that allows you to search a massive database of bloggers using a very precise search functionality. Use GroupHigh to find blogger’s contact details and recent posts. You can even use this tool to track your outreach and engagement efforts with bloggers and thought leaders!
Tools to Get Better Results with your Content
Use the tools below to rate the success of your content and create viral and sharable content. Isn’t it time that you shook up your social content strategy?
- Pikochart is a paid social tool that allows you to create visually appealing infographics for as little as $20. Infographics should be part of your content mix because they drive traffic, engagement, shares and embeds.
- Topsy is a freemium tool that allows you to search for content is popular for a specific keyword or industry. Use Topsy to find popular content to share or use as inspiration for your content. If you want to find content that gets a lot of links, use Topsy.
- Smo.KnowEm.com is a Moz application that allows you to find out if your website is optimized for sharing social media. You know how sometimes when you share a link on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ the image shows up wrong (if one shows up at all!) or perhaps the meta description is all wrong? KnowEm makes suggestions for what technical issues you need to fix or what schema you need to implement in order to optimize your site for social sharing.
- Moz SEO Toolbar shows a web page’s domain authority and page authority in all of the major search engine’s. In fact, Moz will rank the domain and page authority of every page on your website.
- SEMRush is a freemium tool that helps you discover what keywords your competitors are ranking for. Use this information to write strategic, keyword optimized blog content that will help you outrank your competitors.
Tools to Convert More Traffic
Once you get visitors on your website, your next task is to convert them. Ian’s confident that the tools below can help you increase conversions.
- OptinMonster is a paid tool that allows you to create custom pop-up forms that only appear when people are leave your site. Use pop-up forms to recruit more email subscribers, increase conversion rates and encourage return visits to your website. Even if you’re wary of pop-up forms, OptinMonster is less annoying because it only pops up when visitors are leaving your site.
- Viewbix is a paid social tool that allows you to embed clickable links and custom forms within your videos. Use your videos to increase traffic and and grow out your email list with viewbix.
- LeadPages is a paid tool that allows you to download templates of landing pages that are proven to have high conversion rates. Unless you’re an expert landing page builder, don’t re-invent the wheel—save time and increase conversions by using a great landing page template.
Tools to Analyze and Improve Results
So your brand is socially active. Now what? Analyze and refine your content with the social tools below.
- Post Acumen is a paid Facebook analytics tool. PostAcument provides information like the best time of day to post and which images are working and which are not. You can also compare your Facebook page against the Facebook pages of your competitors.
- Steady Demand is one of the only Google+ analytics tools out there. This freemium tool allows you to audit your Google+ page to gauge the performance of you Google+ posts, optimize your posts for search engines and compare your Google+ page against those of your competitors.
- Statigram is a freemium Instagram analytics tool. Use Statigram to track follower growth and engagement stats and discover the best times of day are to post photos. Statigram also offers a marketing package to help you run contests on Instagram.
- SimplyMeasured is a freemium tool that allows you to generate detailed and colorful social media reports for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube.
- Brand24 is a paid tool that monitors mentions of your brand or keywords on Facebook, Twitter, websites and blogs. Brand 24 is also includes sentiment analysis.
Quick Fire Round for Social Media Tools
These are just a few more of Ian’s favorite free social tools. Did I mention that they’re FREE?
- Post planner is a free tool that sources viral images and content. Integrate viral images into your Facebook content and schedule your posts ahead of time with post planner.
- Edit Flow is a free donation editorial calendar and WordPress blog workflow tool.
- Agora Pulse is a freemium social tool that allows you to compare your Facebook page against those of your competitors and run free Facebook contests.
- Canva is a free social tool that allows you to overlay text over your digital images.
- PicMonkey is a free image editing tool that allows you to edit image, overlay text and create collages.
- Pixler is like a free, easy to use version of Photoshop.
- inPowered is a free social media tool that shows you popular content within your niche.
Social media marketing tools can save you time by helping you source great content, identify influencers and brand advocates and measure the success of your social media.
Does your company automate social processes with tools? Please share your all-time favorite social tools with us by commenting below!
