Brittany Botti
In the spirit of thanksgiving, here's a list of social media tools that make your life easier and allow you to post to social media communities with more consistency and quality content.
Listly is another new tool I discovered this year. It takes commenting to another level and allows your readers to help create lists with you. I love adding it to blog posts because it helps me engage with my readers and gives them input. Plus, it’s designed so that it helps with SEO and keeping all traffic on your site instead of Listly’s site.
HootSuite is a huge help to me because I can schedule posts, and also post them to multiple platforms like Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more. It helps me tremendously, especially because some days you’re inspired and can think of a ton of things to post and find a ton of useful info, but other days you come up short. It helps having a tool like HootSuite to regulate your posts so you can stay consistent and not bombard your followers with posts all at once. HootSuite also has great mobile apps so I can work from anywhere and still get the same functionality as I would if I’m at my computer.
The CLIPZINE is a content curation platform that is able to create a Reusable Sharable Portable stylish zine page like beautiful magazine-style. Clipping -> Styling -> Sharing
Zite is a news magazine application available for iPad and iPhone that I use to curate content for myself and my clients, as well as stay up to date on every little change in my industry. All you have to do is add the topics you’re interested in and Zite does the work to find the most relevant, informative content related to those topics. You can then share the article to your social sites or save it to Pocket for later reading. Best of all, you can tell Zite if the content they are recommending for you is good or bad, and over time Zite becomes smarter and better at giving you what you’re looking for. It’s a HUGE time saver for me!
I was introduced to SproutSocial this year and really love it for its reporting capabilities. It helps to visualize your social media measurements in an infographic-esque way, making it quicker and easier for me and my clients to understand the data and how we are progressing.
Instagram really stole the show in the social media world this year and became a surprising player in social media marketing. My clients and I enjoyed a lot of success with the platform, and Statigram helped to make that possible. Statigram is a web browser based application that allows you to view your Instagram stream, search Instagram photos, and comment and like on them. Statigram also has by far the best analytics that I’ve seen out of all the tools I’ve used and researched, and I REALLY wish they would extend it to other social networks! Facebook could learn a lot from them in this area especially.
Google Analytics isn’t a new tool, but it is one of the most valuable tools out there for tracking the success of your social media efforts. This year, Google added a ton more features to track and measure social media’s influence on goal conversion, site traffic, and more.
Springpad is a new tool I discovered this year that has helped me in so many ways. It’s basically like a souped up Pinterest & Evernote combined, and I’ve used it for everything from content curation to creating a portfolio of my work to saving money on my grocery bills every week.
