Our Top 3 Recommended Social Media Tools You Need
Like any true pro, a good social media marketer carries a trusty bag of tricks in his or her virtual back pocket. With the popularity of social media-based and general online marketing opportunities soaring over the last several years, there are countless marketing resources available all around the web. But knowing what to look for, where to find it, and how to use it – that’s what will set you apart from the rest.
Of course, not every marketing tool is relevant to every marketer; but we’ve found that just about everyone can benefit from a free stock photo source, an industry-relevant news feed and a post-scheduling platform. Here are our favorites:
Pixabay
With each blog you write or social media post you publish, you want to accompany it with an eye-catching visual for the best chance at getting noticed. You’ll quickly learn, however, that purchasing quality photos can get costly fast. Thankfully, there are a handful of free stock photo websites that provide high resolution images free of charge. Pixabay, in particular, is a great one because it is constantly updated by its community of artists and offers more than 1.3 million images and videos to choose from. In addition to photos, the site also stocks illustrations and vector images – giving you access to just about any type of artwork you may need.
Feedly and Google Alerts
Technically this is two separate recommendations, but together, Feedly and Google Alerts are your social media lifeline. Quite simply, Google Alerts lets you know any time your company is mentioned in a news article or on any type of outside website. Feedly, meanwhile, helps to keep you up-to-date on the latest news in your industry and provides you with recommended stories to share with your followers.
If you haven’t checked out Feedly yet – you may want to do that right now. It does all the legwork for you and keeps all of your content organized by category, ultimately leaving you with one comprehensive news feed that highlights not only what is changing in your industry and how it impacts you, but also what is relevant to your followers and how that impacts them. As a social media marketer, it is so important to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry, from both an internal and external perspective, and Feedly and Google Alerts allow you to do just that.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is every social media marketer’s dream come true. At its core, it is a post-scheduling platform that allows you to share content across all of your social media channels at once. It also allows you to:
- Target your message to specific audiences on Facebook.
- Tag each post to help you keep track of what types of content are performing best on each social media site.
- Streamline your internal post-approval process.
- Pull content from RSS Reader Integrations – like Feedly, for example – and share it from right within the platform.
Upon logging into Sprout Social, you can access your Smart Inbox, which pulls all of your new followers, mentions and other relevant notifications into one feed so you can seamlessly engage with your audience. And your Twitter and LinkedIn feeds sync right into the platform as well. It makes managing your social media sites so easy.
The most impressive feature that Sprout Social offers, however, is its powerful analytics. It provides completely customizable reports for each of your own social media platforms – and for each of your competitors. Engagement, the volume of posts, top posts and top keywords are just some of the metrics it tracks.
With these three – okay, four! – tools in your arsenal, you will be well on your way to achieving pro-social media marketing status.
For help on how to best adapt these tools to your specific needs, contact Paradigm Marketing and Design for a consultation.
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