7 Radical Social Media Marketing Tools

If you wear a lot of hats (only the white ones, please) and one of them is social media marketing, there’s no denying that time management is an integral factor in your success.

Let’s be real, Facebook is all fun and games until it swallows up half your work day.

If you want to find your audience, interact, and create share-worthy content in half the time, you’re going to need the right tools. Luckily, there are a ton of them out there to help you identify potential followers, generate leads, create content, and schedule status updates.

Here are seven social media marketing tools (and a bonus tip) that we think are totally radical:

Rapportive

Rapportive is a free, simple, and incredibly useful tool that integrates with gmail and other Google apps to help you get to know the people you email with. If you get a lead or you’re emailing back and forth with someone, Rapportive pulls in personalized information about that user. You get to see a photo of them, possibly their professional title and workplace, and a social media profile or two. You can also see mutual friends and other connections you share with them. This is a great way to discover a little bit more about the person you are working with so that you can communicate with them more effectively.

You can also connect with someone on Linkedin directly from their Rapportive profile, and unlike the network itself, you don’t have to prove how you know them. When you go to Linkedin to try and connect with someone it will ask you if they are a friend or co-worker before you can send a request, but Rapportive doesn’t mind making cold connections for you.

Nimble

This is a great social CRM tool that we use here at Webfor. What’s cool about it is that you can highlight someone’s name on the Web (maybe in a byline or something) and right click, and it will pull up the social media profiles that it believes belong to that person. Then you can choose the profiles you know are theirs and build your contact list. It will often tell you their birthday, if they’re married, where they went to school, and where they’re working. Then as you go about your day, it will compile your history of interactions and communications with each user. Nimble also has some other great features, like notifying you when you are mentioned by others on social networks. It has free and pro options, integrates with google apps, and offers a bunch more fun features beyond the ones we could list here.

Hootsuite

This is a popular social media dashboard that allows you to manage many different social accounts from one place. You can schedule your postings, track shares and retweets, and monitor mentions across all the major networks. It’s free for one person with up to five social accounts before you go pro, which then allows you to create teams and set up authorization features, among others.  It also has a nice mobile app so that users can keep up with social media on the go (or on the couch).

Rafflecopter

This is a really cool tool, which also has a free option. If you wanted to do a giveaway promotion on Facebook this is a great way to do it. After you set up the giveaway, you just grab the embed code they create for you and put it on your Website. From there you have some options, two of which are available with a free account.  Users can either put in their email, which is great because you can collect that information, or they can like your facebook page directly through that widget, which is perfect because they don’t have to leave your site. This would help you toward your goals for both Website traffic and page likes.

Canva

Canva is an awesome site where people who aren’t designers can make unique designs for any kind of print and digital content, form infographics to business cards. Because social media is so visual, this is a vital tool for your arsenal, allowing it you to pick templates designed specifically for Pinterest or Facebook that work really well. You can upload your own images, and there are a lot of free options for icons, graphs, banners, and other design elements. By the way, Canva was actually used to make the graphic for this post.

 

Social Crawlytics

This tool is free but requires a Twitter account to get set up (guessing that’s not a problem if you’re reading this). A free account gives you something like 2,000 credits, which we haven’t ran out of in years. Basically you just grab a URL, paste it in, and it will show you the social networks where content from that page has been shared. This is a great tool to use for competitor analysis as you could input a competitor’s blog and see which of their posts are most popular on social media, and which networks get the most action. You can get a good idea of where your followers are and what they are interested in, which are great insights from both a social and content perspective.

Followerwonk

This is probably one of our favoritest tools. When you want to analyse your own profile or another Twitter user, Followerwonk will give you all kinds of useful data, like when followers are most active, their geographical locations, whether they’re male or female, and their level of social influence. You can also track how many followers a user has gained or lost over time. One of the things we find particularly cool is the comparison feature. When Jon Colman was coming to Portland to speak at an SEMpdx event we thought we’d reach out to each one of his followers to invite them to register. But then we realized he has like, 12,000 followers and we were only volunteering. So, using Followerwonk, we compared Jon’s followers with SEMpdx followers, and found a much more workable cross section of about 300 users to reach out to. Piece of cake.

Pro Tip:

If you want to make sure your content looks great and shares easy on social media, you may also want to check out Smo.Knowem.com. Paste in a URL and it will check to make sure you have the proper social markup. You can put in a blog page and see if it has the right authorship markup, and whether you’re set up properly for open graph, Google interactive posts, and a Twitter card.

With these clever tools in your toolbar, you should be able to boost your social activity and do it in less time, and if you’re anything like us that ought to be music to your ears.

Have a favorite social tool to share? Let us know in a comment!