When was the last time you tried a new application? I’m often on the hunt for new tools to share with you that might make your day easier and your social media marketing more efficient.
So when I took at course recently, I learned of some applications and I immediately thought how cool it would be to share them with you. I’ve dropped the more expensive ones from the list since I don’t consider those small business friendly, but you’ll find most of them below.
Let’s get started!
Scheduling Tools
A scheduling app is like a piece of heaven, or New York cheesecake. I can’t decide. What I do know is that scheduling tools enable us to schedule our posts in the morning and then walk away from the computer or at least spend our day working on other digital projects.
Let’s start with MeetEdgar, an app I’ve known about but never before written about. Use this app to schedule recurring messages or blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. MeetEdgar prevents the tedium of having to reschedule posts by hand from a spreadsheet.
Put posts into Social Jukebox to post on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Each Jukebox stores thousands of tweets and posts for reposting. The tool automatically generates thank you tweets every Friday, and Social Jukebox collects mentions of your Twitter account and stores them in a database for you to view.
Hootsuite
You can start with a free plan and schedule your messaging in Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Hootsuite’s free plan allows three accounts, and they may also include Google+ page, Instagram, and YouTube.
Buffer is another scheduling application. With the free account, you can have one user on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and a Google Page account. The free account allows for ten posts at a time. The Awesome plan is just $10/month, includes Pinterest, and allows ten users and up to scheduled 100 posts at a time.
Community Reach and Management
Want to expand your community or reduce it? Try one of these apps for reducing your list of users you’re following or helping you to find new followers.
This app looks at all the users you follow on Twitter and then divides them into influencers and supporters, giving you insight into the people who are following you and engaging with your content. The app will also suggest a list of users you might want to unfollow plus followers you might want to follow.
Tweepi is a Twitter tool that enables you to follow followers and friends, unfollow inactives and those people who you follow but who aren’t following you back. You can also use the tool to search for users by bio, interest, full name, or location and follow users who just tweeted about a certain topic in your niche. In addition, you can unfollow users who neglect to upload an avatar, aka eggheads.
You can use the free version of this tool to unfollow Twitter users and to use some features to grow your account.
If you’re willing to pay $12/month, you have access to additional features. You can:
- Unfollow users who aren’t following you back.
- Unfollow people who don’t use an image for their avatar.
- Unfollow people deemed to be inactive on Twitter.
- Unfollow fake accounts you are following.
- Block accounts that are fake as well as bots.
- Unfollow users based on their influence (I don’t use this feature.).
- Whitelist followers you never want to unfollow (I love this feature.).
Analyze and Report
Want to know how you’re doing on Twitter? Wondering what your ROI (Return on Investment) is like? Try some of these tools.
Use Twitter analytics to better understand your community and to keep tabs on how well your’re doing. The 28-day summary will tell you whether you’ve sent more or fewer tweets, how many tweet impressions you’re generating, how many users are visiting your profile, how many people are mentioning you, and how well you are growing your account. You can also glean information that you can use when you create your Twitter ads.
Mention https://mention.com/en/media-monitoring/
For $29/month, this tool will analyze public opinion with the idea of helping people learn what’s being said about them online.
This is an analytics and scheduling tool for Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Google+. The analytics are beautiful.
Conversation and Chats
Use this app to find chats by an alphabetical listing.
Tweet chats displayed on the screen increase engagement by making joining and participating in a tweet chat super easy.
Hashtags
Hashtags are a gas, aren’t they? They have the magical powers of attracting people to you and helping you find the consumers you want. Before you make up a hashtag for tracking, make sure it’s available and doesn’t have a nefarious meaning.
Hashtagify is a hashtags search engine. It’s hashtags encyclopedia allows users to search among 67,140, 249 hashtags and find the best ones. It’s paid plans start at $9.99 month.
Receive instant feedback on your hashtag choices. For example, type in a hashtag to find out whether it’s hot, has a long life, overused, or is underused.
Frances Caballo is a social media strategist and manager and the author of six books on social media. Click here to schedule an appointment with her.
Interested in marketing a book you wrote? Visit Frances at SocialMediaJustforWriters.com.