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Managing a wide array of social networking profiles can be time consuming without the right tools. This blog post will identify 7 free social media cross platform branding tools essential to the success of your brands social media marketing campaign (not to mention your sanity!). While a campaign may still be ‘manageable’ without third party tools, the ones we identify in this piece will help save time, keep you organized, streamline your efforts, and more.
The first step to using the below chart to figure out which tool is best for you is to make a complete list of all the social networking profiles you’re actively utilizing. I’m a spreadsheet geek and recommend keeping this information readily available for organizational purposes. Secondly: identify which profiles are essential for your brands messaging strategy on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Set up an editorial calendar to keep yourself organized. Plan out daily, weekly, and monthly messages that are consistent with promotions for your brand. Finally, streamline the messaging with one (or a few) of the tools listed below based on the specific social site your updates need to be placed on.
| Social Site | Hootsuite | Seesmic | Tweetdeck | Ping.fm | Posterous | Shareaholic | Sendible |
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Free Tools
If you follow me on Twitter or have read my past blog posts then you know: I’m a huge brand advocate for Hootsuite. I log into Hootsuite daily, and use it more than any other system. Allowing users to manage profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress and Ping.fm, their online platform and mobile app seamlessly connects all your branded accounts for ease of use in monitoring, listening, and messaging. Similar to other platforms such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck, users are able to set up organized columns of data to view threaded conversations, search information, group users, and more. What sets Hootsuite apart is the ability for team members to assign each other tasks on specific messages to respond to, messages to send out, etc…Hootsuite does have a paid option to their platform, giving users even more customization options. Interested in learning more? Visit Hootsuite’s website.
As mentioned above, the Seesmic platform is very similar to Hootsuite. As a real-time platform, receive instant updates from many popular social networking sites: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Buzz. Seesmic users are able to utilize a Desktop platform, a web browser add on, and a mobile app as well. Interested in learning more? Visit Seesmic’s website.
With an iPad app, Mobile apps, and desktop application, Tweetdeck is the preferred platform of many. Message like a pro on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. Share photos and links directly from Tweetdeck, comment and like posts on Facebook, and group friends. Tweetdeck wants you to think of their system as an air traffic controller of Twitter and other social networking sites. Interested in learning more? Visit Tweetdeck’s website.
Dreaming of a system that will allow you to update your status message across over 30 social networking sites? It’s possible with Ping.fm. While Ping doesn’t offer a dashboard to manage conversations, it does provide users with the ability to send your message across multiple platforms with the click of a button. Hootsuite, Sendable and Sharaholic allow you to manage your accounts on Ping.fm, creating even more usability! Interested in learning more? Visit Ping.fm’s website.
Sharing is as easy as sending an e-mail with Posterous. Posterous has been touted as one of the webs best social networking tools, and is used by social media mavens such as Guy Kawasaki, Justine Ezarik and Robert Scoble. What Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Seesmic lack, Posterous has. Even more sites are connected with Posterous in addition to Facebook and Twitter: YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Picasa, and more. Interested in learning more? Visit Posterous’ website.
Sharaholic makes sharing easy: one of the simplest tools to share, save, and spread information on the web. 1 click posting is available for over 100 social networking sites, and with Sharaholic’s web browser add ons users are able to share, save and spread info from any web page. Sharaholic is award-winning and highly recommended to help you keep a finger on the pulse of the web. Interested in learning more? Visit Sharaholic’s website.
Promote, grow and track your brands not only through the use of social media, but also SMS and e-mail messaging. Self described as a one-stop-shop for all your marketing needs, Sendible certainly has a lot to offer. I’ve been testing out Sendiable for a short time, and have started to fall in love with it’s easy to use dashboard and cutting edge offerings. Available to agencies with a paid option for increased usability options, the free option provides a lot of usability options as well. Post to multiple services, schedule messages including e-mails and SMS texts, bulk message, use analytics to make reports, and integrate functionality with customized applications. Offering the most options that we examined in the above tools, Sendible is certainly worth a look. Interested in learning more? Visit Sendible’s website.
Paid Tools
Business tools for the social web include SproutSocial, allowing businesses to listen, engage and grow in ‘minutes a day’. Pricing & plans start at just $9 monthly, ideal for in-house brand managers and agencies alike. “Sprout Social is a solid offering for the smaller brand or agency; it offers more robust management tools, but it’s still affordable” – Mashable. Interested in learning more? Visit SproutSocial’s website.
The ultimate Facebook application design company has developed the ultimate platform in social media management. Involver’s engagement platform integrates seamlessly with many social media networks and is ‘the only tool of its kind to quantify, monitor and optimize their brand’s audience across social channels and then take action with that information – at enterprise scale’. Pricing is not available on their website. Interested in learning more? Visit Involver’s website.
A social media monitoring and engagement platform for brands, Radian6 is one of the most popular for full brand management. Intelligent reporting and analytics are available with each Radian6 dashboard. Pricing starts at $600 monthly, which includes unlimited archiving for the life of your brands active profile. Interested in learning more? Visit Radian6′s website.
Facilitating the 2-way conversation between you and your fans or followers, Virtue Publisher 2.0 is there to help deliver your brands message directly to Twitter and Facebook with the click of a button. Manage your social relationships with dynamic applications, scheduling and moderation, real-time metrics, and integration of third party analytics and metrics tools. Pricing is not available on their website. Interested in hearing more? Visit Virtue Publisher’s website.
As a brand, or even an agency managing your client’s social media marketing, you have many options as far as cross platform branding tools go. Examining all of your options based on the social profiles that are important to you will help you make the final decision of choosing one of the above tools we’ve highlighted.
Have experience with any of the above tools, or know of a new tool we should add to the list? Let us know in the comments below!
As our in house Social Media Architect, Kaila Strong and our Internet Marketing Specialists Abby Gilmore and Kristi Hines prepare for this month’s webinar, Developing Social Media Strategies for Cross Platform Branding on November 11th at 8:30 am PST (10:30am CST, 11:30am EST) I’ll be (virtually) sitting down with some of the best and brightest in the social media world.
This week, I had the great pleasure of asking a few questions to one of my personal favorite social media strategists Jay Baer. He’s an author and an amazing speaker as well as the President of the consultancy Convince & Convert. Founder of five companies, he has worked with over 700 brands since 1994, including 25 of the Fortune 1000. His Convince & Convert blog is ranked among the world’s top marketing resources. He’s the co-author of the forthcoming book The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social.
Elise Redlin-Cook: Can you describe what you do in 140 characters or less?
Jay Baer: I’m a hype-free social media strategist, author, and speaker.
Elise: Nice answer! So, just how important is an understanding of psychology or sociology?
Jay: More and more important every day. Understanding why customers want to interact with brands, and what they hope to take away from that relationship is a major component of social success – especially as it gets increasingly competitive.
Elise: Do you think that social media adoption is affecting human consciousness? How?
Jay: Sure. We are clearly replacing some of our deeper, real-world relationships with a larger number of shallower, digital connections. Part of that is the continuing time crunch under which we all seem to live. Part of it is the pure convenience of keeping in touch with friends with just a few keystrokes, while wearing a bathrobe.
Elise: What are some of the biggest mistakes or misconceptions that you see novices consistently make?
Jay: Focusing on how to do social, instead of how to be social. Forgetting that the goal isn’t to be good at social media, but rather to be good at business because of social media.
Elise: I’ve always wondered, how and why did you get into social media business?
Jay: It was a natural extension of the work I’ve done in Web strategy and online marketing since 1994.
Elise: What is one of the biggest myths you’re seeing perpetuated about social media?
Jay: That social media is somehow going to kill email. Tough to do when you have to have an email address to sign up for any social site, and all your social alerts are delivered via email.
Elise: Can you share a some tips on how companies can decide where to start in social media marketing?
Jay: The most important question to ask, is “Why are we doing this?” Know very clearly what your company hopes to accomplish, and how you’ll know success when you see it. If you can do that, the rest is comparatively easy.
Elise: I’m sure you love what you do, but what is one thing do you dislike about the social media industry?
Jay: The snarkiness and the egos. It’s all very high school sometimes.
Elise: I can’t find enough hours in the day, how do you find the time and more importantly manage it to stay active with social media?
Jay: It’s a bit easier for me to justify the time because being active in social media is my job. But as I say a lot in my presentations, social media actually makes it easier – not harder. I built my original network of friends and colleagues the old school way, by going to industry networking events. I went to an average of 3 business networking events per week for 10 years. I built my connections with Bud Light and chicken appetizers. So for me, to be able to connect with people from a hand-held device in just a few seconds is actually a breeze.
That’s a great point for Jay Baer! What other than business networking has social media made easier in your life?
The ultimate goal of any Internet marketing services company is to help its clients rank high on page 1 of Google for all their important search terms.
Anybody who has spent any length of time in the search space, however, will tell you that ranking above the fold in Google for all of your search terms is often an unrealistic pursuit, particularly when you are going after highly competitive keywords.
That’s why it’s so important to find alternative ways to carve out some temporary space atop the Google rankings, and one of the best ways you can do that is by getting your blog posts to rank in Google News. If your posts show up often enough for keywords you’re trying to win, you can accrue significant traffic on competitive keywords even if you’re far from the first page.
Most of you have already completed the first step in this process, but if you haven’t then make sure your site has been submitted for inclusion to Google News. They generally like to see that your blog possesses multiple writers and is updated consistently so they can differentiate the quality sites from the unworthy ones.
Once you are a part of Google News, the biggest key to getting your articles to rank is to optimize your title tags. It doesn’t take an SEO genius to figure out you need to include the keyword you hope to rank for in said article, and I have found significantly higher success rates when my keyword leads the title. To prevent awkward titles, I have often used some variation of “Keyword: Conclusion about keyword” in my title tags.
Next you need to get familiar with the SERP page for each of your particular keywords you are ranking for (as if you weren’t already). Some keywords will constantly bring up News Results and others will do so incredibly infrequently.
In my other life, I run a Phoenix Suns blog called ValleyoftheSuns.com. It’s awfully difficult to get a blog to rank for a premium keyword such as “Phoenix Suns,” but I pump out content on a daily basis, content that often sees Page 1 thanks to the Google News results at the top of this keyword’s SERP.
In this screen shot taken on Oct. 13, my site as well as The Arizona Republic and fellow blog BrightSideoftheSun.com rank above the fold behind only the team’s official site and the team’s Wikipedia page in the Google News results.
If you’re an average fan searching for what’s going on with the Phoenix Suns, you’re likely to click on these latest news results about the team. The same could be said for anybody doing a search with the intention of looking for the latest on that particular industry.
ValleyoftheSuns’ Google Analytics results from the past year bear that conclusion out.
As you can see in the above screen shot, after my site name the top three searches that find ValleyoftheSuns are high volume keywords that I don’t rank very well for: Phoenix Suns (135,000 global searches, page 4 of Google), Steve Nash (135,000, page 3 for an article) and Amare Stoudemire (49,500, page 3 for an article).
Clearly these people are not finding ValleyoftheSuns by digging deep into the search results. Since I write articles on these topics multiple times a week and include these keywords in the title (as well as naturally in the body), I’m able to rank on Page 1 temporarily with a timely news/analysis article that attracts a multitude of clicks.
I performed an experiment last February in the weeks leading up to the NBA trade deadline while Suns star forward Amare Stoudemire was on the trading block. Whether or not the Suns were going to trade him was one of the hottest topics in sports during those weeks, and I cashed in with the traffic by optimizing the headlines of all my articles on the topic.
My staff and I wrote as many insightful articles on the topic as possible and used our analytics and other signals such as Google Suggest to figure out how people were searching for this topic. We then optimized our titles for said keywords. These signals were more useful than traditional data such as what you get from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool since the traffic for these keywords, especially the long tail ones, was much higher during this high intensity time than it would be during an average month.
As you can see below, the majority of my Google traffic came from “Amare Stoudemire” and “trade rumors” related keywords during the three-plus weeks before the trade deadline, pushing my usual top keyword “Phoenix Suns” all the way down to No. 9.
In this example, I took advantage of the news cycle by optimizing for keywords and writing content on what was a hot button issue in my vertical. Predicting the kind of keywords that will get spikes in search traffic during a given time and then writing headline-optimized articles on those topics can lead to major traffic boons in all industries.
This isn’t to mitigate the importance of building quality links and ensuring that all of your on-site SEO elements are well-optimized; those should be your first two priorities. It’s just to say that when you are struggling to break into the top 10 for high volume keywords, optimizing your site’s blog posts and articles can be an easy way to acquire some quality short-term traffic.
This week, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with a social media leader, Chris Voss, President of Strategix One Consulting, and host of the Chris Voss show. He shares his 20+ yrs experience as a serial entrepreneur of successful companies in Business and Marketing and I asked him a few questions about social media marketing.
Elise Redlin-Cook: Can you describe what you do in 140 characters or less?
Chris Voss: Serial Entrepreneur and I’m a business consultant for business’ that want to succeed in business, Social Media, marketing etc.
Elise: How important is an understanding of psychology or sociology?
Chris: SUPER important. Being a manager or CEO means you have to understand people and how they tick. Or at least try to. I’ve had over 1000 employees. I’ve been a life, psychology, marriage, children, financial, guidance, drug, pick you up at the bar, bail you out of jail, counselor etc. It never ends, people see you as a leader and it’s not as simple as you’d like it sometimes. Listening and understanding is important.
Elise: Do you think that social media adoption is affecting human consciousness? How?
Chris: Yes, but it goes both ways. I think Social Media is a product of where we’ve come as humans and technology. I think it’s like anything being integrated, it’s progressing our change. I think it’s both good and bad like anything else. It’s connecting us like never before worldwide and giving a very powerful voice to people. On the other hand there are many disconnects, like loss of intimacy and physical communication skills between people. It’s like anything else in the development dichotomy of human nature, it can be used for good or bad.
Elise: What are the most essential works that influenced your career?
Chris: Anthony Robbins, Earl Nightengale, Tom Peters, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Elise: What are some of the biggest mistakes or misconceptions that you see novices consistently make?
Chris: Playing follow the leader and believing the mass thinking. A million morons yacking the same thing doesn’t make it so, neither does a million bloggers. Great people are visionaries, they aren’t busy drinking the kool aid.
Elise: How and why did you get into social media business?
Chris: 3 other Corporations I owned slowed significantly with the recession. For 2 decades people had been suggesting I do business consulting full time. I finally got the time.
Elise: What are your favorite tools for social media?
Chris: The proprietary ones we developed for our clients to market with. I love Hootsuite also – the new HTML 5 browser setup they have is great. Tweetdeck and Seesmic have good products also. On my iPad I use Twitterific and on iPhone I use Twittelator. Love em both and I’ve tried all the major Apps.
Elise: We are seeing so many mergers and acquisitions lately, is there one that you think would make perfect sense?
Chris: They usually don’t make sense, except for lining the pockets of certain people.
Elise: When/ How did you first realize the innate true power of social media as a marketing tool?
Chris: In 2009, When my business’s websites started getting massive traffic from it. I was blown away that I could control directing traffic to my sites. Mainly without buying Google adsense words and having SEO stuff setup. I love it – Twitter is a great link generator.
Elise: What is one of the biggest myths you’re seeing perpetuated about social media?
Chris: That brands and marketing didn’t care about building relationships before Social Media. That its not about selling, in truth, everyone is pitching and selling themselves or their wares.
Elise: I’m sure you love what you do, but what is one thing do you dislike about the social media industry?
Chris: The quacks who repeat everyone and can’t generate mass traffic to clients sites. The gestapo types who run around attacking people with different ideas because they don’t conform to their assumptions. Social Media “experts” who attack people by being unsociable.
Elise: How do you measure influence?
Chris: Traffic = Sales. If you can move people to come to your site regularly – you win. You can build the greatest website known to man, if you can’t get traffic to it, it’s a waste.
Elise: I can’t find enough hours in the day, how do you find the time and more importantly manage it to stay active with social media?
Chris: Time Management, programming, efficiency.
These are great tips from Chris! If your are looking to learn more on social media, our in house Social Media Architect, Kaila Strong invites you to attend the upcoming webinar, Developing Social Media Strategies for Cross Platform Branding on November 11th at 8:30 am PST (10:30am CST, 11:30am EST). Join us to explore different industries that have utilized a combination of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social networking sites to develop a good social media strategy.
Do you have some social media marketing tips to share? Feel free to share in the comments below.
In this series of blog posts I have talked a lot about the importance of setting up goals, and goal values, in Google Analytics so that you can get an accurate idea of which traffic sources, keywords and website pages are doing the most for your bottom line.
Setting up goals in Analytics is a simple task, in the ‘Edit’ section of a profile, you are able to choose between three types of goals: a URL, time on site or pageviews per visit. The last two goal options are determined by being more or less than a given amount, and can be useful for customer service websites where you either want to provide information as quickly as possible. This can also be useful for entertainment sites that want to engage with their target audience for a long time, for either long time on site, or many pageviews.
However, for most businesses and websites, the goal that they will want to track will be a URL, such as a “Thank You” page after a sale or completing a contact form.
However, there are many other websites that exist for a purpose other than to make sales via ecommerce, receive sales leads, provide information quickly or even engage an audience. Websites set up to make affiliate sales might be one such example, as would many blogs, including my co-worker’s Phoenix Suns blog, which I shall use as an example later in this post.
Many blogs of this nature make their money from advertising, which is often done based on the number of impressions and visitors, so in some ways getting people to visit the website is success in itself. However, getting people to return to the website regularly could be said to be the purpose of the website, so the goal of the page might be to attract subscribers to the RSS feed or followers on twitter.
Unfortunately Google Analytics is only able to measure what takes place on the website itself, so as soon as any visitor clicks to Feedburner or Facebook, they leave the site and it is no longer traceable. To get around this problem, website owners can utilize Event Tracking or Virtual Pageviews to monitor clicks on these external links.
Event Tracking is a relatively new feature to Google Analytics that superseded Virtual Pageviews, apart from one very important aspect as we shall see later. It is essentially a piece of code that can be added to any link, or website feature, that can then monitor if a visitor clicks on that part of the page during the visit.
For example, at the bottom and side of this page we suggest that you “follow us” on social media sites or RSS, and if you look at the page source code you will see the following;
This highlighted code in the href essentially monitors each click and then categorizes the category, action, label and value, the last two of which are optional (we did not use a value). This code is useful for tracking not only which external links your visitors are clicking, but can also be used with interactive features of a website such as games and videos.
This data can then be broken down in Analytics to see which activities are being performed on your website, where people are clicking, what documents are being downloaded, and so on. You could then use this information to get a better understanding of how visitors use your website, and then use this information to better design your website towards these events.
An Event Tracking report is available in Analytics within the “Content” drop down and shows information such as the number of events, when they happened, and which kinds of events took place;
Returning to the example we have in place on this page, and looking at the ‘Category’ report in Analytics, we can see that the social media links in the sidebar are clicked about twice as often as those in the footer;
However, while you can give an Event a ‘value’ these are not to be confused with goal values, and event tracking cannot be used with goal tracking in analytics, despite there being strong demand for it . This is a great disadvantage of Event Tracking, when compared to Virtual Pageviews.
As mentioned previously, Virtual Pageviews were superseded by Event Tracking as they create fake page views which can inflate website numbers. However, as Events can’t be tracked as goals by Analytics, but URLs can, Virtual Pageviews enable you to track links that go to other websites as a goal, and are therefore still very useful.
Returning to the example of a blog, if you go to valleyofthesuns.com and look at the page source, for the social media links in the right hand side of the page, which are the website goal to increase return visitors, you will see the following;
The highlighted code essentially tricks Analytics into thinking a pageview for www.valleyofthesuns.com/follow/rss took page when the link is clicked (a page that in reality doesn’t exist). By then setting up this goal as a URL destination goal and giving it a goal value, we can then monitor which visitors, traffic sources and keywords were most likely to subscribe, and then experiment with different website designs to lead to higher conversion rates.
Therefore, there are advantages to both methods, and as a general rule I would say that if it is not your primary goal use Event Tracking, otherwise use Virtual Pageviews to set a URL destination goal. For example, on this page our primary goal is for you to contact us to see how we can help you, so we use event tracking to record offsite links. However, for blogs or affiliate sites where the offsite link is the primary goal, then there is no other option than to use Virtual Pageviews.
