by 
We love Twitter. But we love it even more because of the add-ons, apps and tools that are available to us. Here is a list of some of the tools that we love to use. They are each uniquely designed to improve your social media marketing efforts. Using only a few of them will immediately streamline your Twitter presence and make you come off far more professional than if you so-called “do it yourself.” With so many free tools at your disposal, there’s no reason not to take advantage of the benefits.
These tools are designed to make your Twitter experience easier. Discover which tools you can use right now to improve your Tweet capacity. Learn more about scheduling your Tweets for the precise time of day and week they are likely to get opened. You can also schedule automated re-tweets of other RSS feeds. This is a great way to stay connected to a particular community without having to be constantly “on-line” in person. There are tools to help you aggregate the Tweets / followed companies you wish to foreground. And of course there are numerous analytical tools to help you track who is opening / re-tweeting / sharing your updates. Most of these tools begin with a free service that is perfect for a small to mid-sized company, so this is why we love them for our clients and ourselves.
Social Media Marketing Begins With HootSuite
While there are many other services that imitate it, HootSuite still provides our favourite platform from which to schedule / monitor / research hashtags / etc. on Twitter. It is a premiums service that is offered for free (up to 5 social profiles.) But beyond that, it is a mere $9/month for unlimited profile management if you’re part of a larger company of employees who use Twitter. This is incredibly reasonable for the social media marketing power it delivers. There’s no excuse for a company to not encourage all their employees to use Twitter. And HootSuite makes it fairly easy for even the most techno-squeamish.
If you’re a digital marketer, as well you can use HootSuite to discover the applications that other tweeters are using to send out their tweets. This is a great way to discover new software and also to see what is the most popular among social media marketing users who are like you.
In ColdAd, we strongly recommend using HootSuite:
- We use it for managing our own social media and also our clients.
- It is a Canadian company.
Paper.li Allows you be a Publisher
One thing that will never die is fact that the Internet is too big to read. Social media is a way for us to keep informed but it can get quite busy with all the traffic. Paper.li is a service that helps you create a newspaper out of the RSS feeds you follow and the Tweets you deem important. It’s a way for your followers to easily assimilate the news they require without having to receive numerous Tweets over the course of the week. Instead, your newspaper can come out once a week / month in order to sum up and distill the important news.
How to Engage, Track and Analyze Conversations
Very often you’ll want to find out what other people are saying about your brand / company. One of the tools we recommend is ExactTarget by Salesforce. This is an easy-to-use social media marketing tool that allows you to manage your Twitter accounts, collaborate with multiple users on your team, track clicks and examine analytics. As well, much like HootSuite, it allows you to schedule Tweets and monitor conversations. At the higher paid level, it becomes an effective marketing tool when it is used in connection to high-powered CRM platform such as Salesforce.
Scheduling Should be Taken Seriously
You may have a lot of information to get out in a day, but the worst thing you can do is to clog your followers’ inboxes. One way to ensure that you schedule properly is to use Buffer. This app lets you know which Tweets are the most popular and which aren’t performing as well. The analytics help you develop a better schedule.
URL Shortening and so Much More
Bit.ly is the famous method for shortening URLs so you can gain more real estate on those 140-character Tweets. Did you know that they also offer services to help you share links to multiple Twitter accounts? They can also show you the stats on any of the Bit.ly links. As well, you can create your own branded, customized short domain URLs.
Put Your CRM Into Overdrive
When it comes to managing a larger database, consider the pricey but full-featured services offered by Sproutsocial.com. Among their many powerful tools, two of my favourites are:
- The ability to have access to past conversations when responding to a comment. This is uniquely important for quality social media marketing purposes. You or your community manager can easily view the history of your contact with each unique comment. Then you can respond directly and personally to each. As well, you can customize your contact database to keep private notes on potential leads.
- Deeper analytics. A more refined look at your audience in terms of age, gender, etc. AS well, monitor conversations for mentions of your brand keywords – with our without hashtags.
Sprout Social is a good tool, but expensive in compare to what you can get from Hootsuite.
Want to Post More Than 140 Characters?
TweetDeck by Tweeter is another tool that is similar to HootSuite. The benefit of using their app is that it lodges nicely onto your desktop. The disadvantage of this is that you can’t use it on multiple computers. But just like HootSuite, you can use their Deck.ly service, which allows you to create shortened URLs that can direct your followers to Tweets that exceed the normal 140-character limit.
Promote Yours and Your Followed RSS Feeds
If you have a company with an RSS feed that you love, you can automate that love with Twitterfeed. Using them, you’ll be able to share updates of any RSS feed with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. This is an especially effective social media marketing tool if you are trying to grow your follower base and expand your brand’s reach.
Automate Your Direct Messages
There are a lot of services for social media marketing that offer Tweet scheduling and keyword tracking, but you may find that SocialOomph is the right one for your needs. With them, you can also schedule automated DMs to your new followers on top of the other normal services.
It Takes a Community to Increase Your Traffic
As with anything online, the more people who engage with your site / content, the better your ranking and validity. This is what the service Triberr offers. They are an “invitation-only” community that allows you to join “tribes” of other bloggers writing content in your particular niche. You plug in your RSS fee and the members of your “tribe” guarantee to Tweet about each of your new blog post entries. You can also automate your ability to Tweet other’s member’s posts so you can keep connected to your community with little effort.
Don’t get too Automatic About Following
A lot of these services offer you the power to automatically re-tweet or share content created by your community. This is great, however, you should always be reading the content you’re sharing. Unless you trust an author 100%, always make sure that the content you re-tweet is quality. The last thing you need is to become associated with lower-quality content.
We would love to hear your opinion on these services. And if you have anything else to report, our community could benefit from your experience. So feel free to share it here. We may even include your site in our future blog posts and especially our Tweets. Let’s get connected, get sharing and get optimizing.
Leave a Reply