Every marketer wants to make their job streamlined and easier to get results. There are a ton of tools out there to increase your productivity, but sometimes you can lost in so many tools that you just want to keep it simple and effective. We as marketers also start to listen to everyone’s opinion, but we should know to debunk those marketing myths.
The ideal job for marketers is to generate leads to their website and funnel the users through their website to turn into sales.
We want to make that as easy as possible and for that to happen we want the internet to work for us, not the other way around. Here are some tools that can help us automate that process. Keep in mind that while there are many more tools, these are either free or extremely cheap to use.
Automate the Internet
IFTTT – If This Then That is very easy to setup with over one hundred apps. You can automatically post your latest WordPress post to Facebook or Twitter (or to your Buffer if you want to stick to your optimized schedule). Take an RSS feed and automatically tweet new posts out (but don’t let this be the only thing you are doing on Twitter). Be sure to have personalized, conversations and engaging posts in the mix as well.
Zapier – Similar to Buffer in that if something gets triggered, or in their terms zapped, then the action you select will then happen. They have support for over 300 applications, so slightly more than Buffer. It all depends on the applications that you need to use in an automated fashion to determine which is best for you.
Getting Social
Buffer – I prefer it to Hootsuite because the dashboard is very simplistic and easy to use. You can easily use it for dozens of different clients and keep your queue filled up. You can also easily share when you’re browsing the internet with their browser plugins too.
It suggests content to share, as well as sets up your schedule for optimal times of engagement. You can also share the same piece of content several times over the next few months, all with a different message.
Tweriod – Online tool that will analyze your followers, when they are active on Twitter, and let you know the best days and times to share your content. Typically the best times are Monday – Thursday, from a little before noon (be mindful of west coasters) until the late afternoon. Twitter apparently takes 3-day weekends so stay away from Friday – Sunday. Buffer lets you easily see analytics and what posts got the most visibility and engagement.
Buzzsumo – Buzzsumo is a great way to see what topics are trending and how many social shares they got. You can filter by infographics, guest posts, articles, giveaways, videos and interviews over the past year, 6 months, past month, week, or in the last day. It will show the number of shares across all the top social networks as you can see below:
This will help with your brainstorming stage of creating content and will give you an idea of what has worked, what hasn’t and what hasn’t really been done yet…or effectively.
You can see top influencers for keywords and look at how often they get retweeted, the percentage of their tweets that are retweets, and the percentage of how often they reply.
Lastly, ContentGems is a great tool that you can use for free for up to 2 keyword terms. You put in your interests and get a daily e-mail from the most trending topics associated with those keywords.
This list can help you get started to automate a lot of your daily processes, but it isn’t the complete list as there are many more subscription options out there. If you have any free or cheap tools to automate the internet and your social media marketing please drop a line below
