5 tools to enhance social media marketing

7 Min Read
Social Media

Everyday you see hundreds if not thousands of adverts of companies trying to catch your attention online. Brands and companies rather invest their money on social media because that is where the crowd is now. I read this some where ‘If your business is not online in the next 5 years then you have no business’.

Any business owner that might want to tap into the online community may find these tools handy to make your time online worthwhile.

Quill Engage

I have heard just about every opinion out there on using analytics. Most complaints are that they are too complicated, or there are too many options.

Quill Engage is a smart little tool that can scan your Google Analytics account and produce a report in plain English.

Instead of reporting everything, it makes notes of big changes that warrant your attention.

Now, obviously, this has to do with marketing in general, not just social media, but it can let you know when there’s an unexpected change (good or bad) with your social media referral traffic.

There’s not much you have to do: just create an account, and connect it to your Google Analytics account.

King Sumo headlines

This WordPress plugin is one of a few that allow you to A/B test (split test) headlines against each other.
Once you’ve installed the plugin, you will notice that there are multiple spaces for titles on any post you create.

Those titles will randomly be served to visitors whenever possible. As those titles get more impressions, you’ll notice the percentages beside each title change. These tell you which headlines are most effective, and you can select a “winner” when you’re satisfied.

Note that this plugin only works on sites with a good level of traffic. Otherwise, you’ll never have a statistically significant sample size for each headline.

Now, what does this have to do with social media?

By finding the best performing headline for your post, you can often increase traffic to the post (from social media and other sources) by over 50%. Not bad for typing a few extra headlines.

According to tests by Upworthy, the headline can be the difference between 1,000 and 1,000,000 people seeing a story. Typically, the difference isn’t that large, but it is somewhere between 50-500%.

IFTTT

IFTTT is a fantastic Swiss army knife tool for all types of marketers. Best of all, you can use all of its functionality free.

While this tool has gained some popularity, the reason it has not been adopted by more marketers and SEOs is because there’s a bit of a learning curve.

IFTTT stands for:
◾IF This…
◾Then That

You get to define the “this” and “that.”

For example, you could say IF a new post is published on Quick Sprout (the “this” event), THEN send me an email (the “that” event).
Each series of events that you define is called a “recipe.” You can create as many recipes as you like. IFTTT is especially great for social media marketers because the tool can post, read, and do all sorts of things with almost all major social networks:
◾Facebook
◾Twitter
◾Pinterest
◾YouTube
◾Instagram
◾LinkedIn
◾Tumblr

One other neat thing about IFTTT is that you can add recipes created by other people. While it’s good to think about how to customize a recipe for your specific business, sometimes you’ll find that the perfect one is already made.

Buffer

Buffer is fairly well-known by now by social media marketers, but it still needs to be included in this list. If you have not tried it yet, you’re going to be blown away by how easy it makes posting regular content to your social media accounts.

The idea behind Buffer is this: create a posting schedule for each of your social media accounts, all in one place. You can connect your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest accounts, and your Google+ pages.

Then, you can add posts to your “queue” inside Buffer. Based on your settings, Buffer will automatically share posts from your queue to the social accounts you’ve chosen.

Set up a free account, and connect a social media account. Once you’ve done so, click “Schedule.”

You’ll be able to choose when you post and what days you post on. You can do this once and then never think about scheduling social posts again—a huge time saver.

Now you need to add some content to your queue, which will be shared automatically at the times you just selected.

Post planner

This tool is an app that integrates directly into Facebook. It is designed to make scheduling Facebook posts easier and more effective.

The main limitation and strength is that it is limited to Facebook. If you only focus on Facebook, it might be the best tool for you. But if you focus on other networks instead—or as well—you’re probably better off with a tool such as Buffer or Edgar.

This is a really robust tool, so I can’t go through all its features. Here are the most important ones:

Post scheduling – You can schedule posts on your Facebook page ahead of time and do it in bulk.

Target your audience – One really useful feature is the ability to target specific countries while scheduling a post. You can segment posts by time zone or run a promotion for certain users.

Automate posting – You can tell the tool to automatically post new content from an RSS feed. Not usually the best option, but it can be handy.

Trending content – You can quickly find trending content on Facebook based on a chosen keyword. You can share this content knowing that it will be popular with your followers as well.

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