Top Tools for Automating and Accelerating Your Social Media Marketing Campaign
Social media marketing can take a lot of time and effort. Especially when you recognize the sheer number of different social sites out there and the importance of treating each one differently.
Thankfully though, there are also a number of tools out there that can save you time and that can even automate some aspects of the process. None of these tools are completely essential to succeed on social networks but any of them can help you to get better results from less work and as such should certainly be considered.
IFTTT
IFTTT stands for ‘If This, Then That’ and is a very powerful app for social media marketing. This essentially allows you to set up ‘If, Then’ statements between different social media accounts, web apps and even hardware.
So for instance you could say ‘IF someone posts X onto Facebook, THEN share it to Twitter’. That’s a very simplistic example however. More creative uses could include updating Twitter with your physiological data using the UP fitness tracker, or perhaps you’d like to save all of your Instagram pictures to DropBox? The sky is the limit here, so be creative and think about how you can enhance your social media campaign with this tool.
Rapportive
Rapportive is a social media tool specifically for LinkedIn. It’s also one of the most powerful and useful tools on the web for digital marketers.
Essentially, what this does is to allow you to see the LinkedIn account of anyone who sends you an e-mail through Gmail. In turn, this then means that you can add them to your connections with a single click, or just get more information about the person you’re talking to online. This is incredibly useful for marketers who attend networking events – it lets you turn an e-mail address into a LinkedIn contact.
Buffer
Buffer is another very useful tool. This one lets you schedule posts to various social media accounts. So you can create potentially thousands of Tweets or status updates in one sitting and then have them post on a regular basis.
The great thing about this, is that it means your profile never looks ‘dead’ and completely quiet. What’s more, it lets you save considerable time.
FollowerWonk
Arguably more important than the number of followers you have, is how influential and how engaged those followers are. FollowerWonk allows you to see which followers are your most valuable as well as other data – such as when they’re most active.
