Showing posts with label Tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tools. Show all posts

Vine Shut Down: 9 Lessons We Learn

Twitter is shutting down video-sharing service Vine, at October 27, 2016 the company announced. Vine, which lets you share short video clips, debuted in 2013. Twitter acquired Vine in 2012 before the service had even launched.

The news comes the same day Twitter announced it would lay off more than 300 workers, or 9% of the company's global workforce, within the company's sales, partnerships, and marketing teams.

"Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today," Twitter said in a release, adding that users will be given a heads-up and be able to download their Vines before the app shutters for good.


"Don’t sell your company!" Vine co-founder RusYusupov, who was laid off from Twitter in October 2015, wrote in a tweet.

Acquired by Twitter in 2012, Vine started off strong, becoming the No. 1 app on the iTunes App Store only six months after joining the company. At one point, Vine had more than 200 million active users, yet it struggled to maintain traction and saw a decline in popularity in recent months.




Competition from Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube made it difficult to stand out from the pack. According to data from App Annie, Vine has since dropped to No. 284 in the top charts for free applications on iOS, down from the low 100s at the beginning of the year. It’s still fairly well-ranked (No. 24) in the Photo & Video category, but hasn’t placed on the Entertainment apps top charts since 2015.

So what lessons we can learn from Vine’s short lifespan?

1. Don’t Invested Too In One Medium

How many times have you heard that Facebook is essential to your business success? Or a blog? Instagram? Did you hear the latest advice that you should must be on Snapchat?

There are as many opinions as people; and everyone thinks that their way is the only right way, especially if they’re successful. However, at the end of the day, you have to remember that a web platform or app is just that: a channel for deliver your message. Trends will come and go, and so will the apps we love and use.

Yes, some platforms have proven their longevity, yet there is no guarantee that all of them will exist in the form we know them today. To put it in a perspective, just a decade ago, when Myspace was at its prime, people would call you crazy if you suggested that it wouldn’t be around for much longer. So would do the people who have millions of followers on Vine.

So, you have to figure out what is your message and simply find a way to share it in a variety of formats. That way, you’re not putting all of you eggs in one basket.

2. Smaller Communities Can Be Passionate

Vine had brought together a strong community. While it may not have been relatively huge, it was meaningful. Users who stuck around for the whole time feel strongly about Vine.

I am not saying you should be present on every web & social network out there, but smaller communities, or niches, can be very powerful medium for deliver your message. A thousand passionate customers may prove to be much more important, than 10,000 distracted followers who do not have an emotional connection with what you offering.

3. Stay Updated

Don’t jump on every single platform & App out there. However, pay attention to where your real & potential customers are.

Let’s say your product caters to young adults. Well, you have to follow them around where they reside online. Because Facebook was great for reaching millennials five years ago, that doesn’t mean you should cling to it and ignore Google+, Pinterest, Instagram or Snapchat.

Moreover, analyze the appeal of these different web mediums and see if you can uncover bigger trends and needs. For example, Google Allo is Smart. Snapchat offers privacy. Facebook Live offers broadcasting opportunities. However, all of them offer an instantaneous feeling, being there in a moment. This is what people care about these days.

4. Get Artistic

One of the possible reasons for Vine Shut Down is the fact that marketers didn’t find a good way to leverage the platform. Yes, I know bad, bad marketers; they want to leverage everything. However, social networks depend on funding and leveraging.

This fact presented a huge untapped opportunity for business owners. Since most of advertisers had their reasons not to be bothered with Vine, business owners who wanted to be heard could easily monetize Vine to deliver their message in a very artistic way.

Yes, six seconds seems like an extremely short amount of time to “peg” your potential customers, but, hey, look at all those Viners who showed an enormous creativity with the time limitation. Who is to say that a smart marketer could not become an overnight success with a single Vine going viral? Besides, a skillful series of Vines would not go unnoticed.

5. Talk To People In Their Language

Another issue that contributed to Vine’s Shut Down was that the platform had a lot of insider talk going on. “The app generated countless memes, and grew increasingly self-referential over time, so that a single six-second clip might reference a dozen previous hit Vines,” The Verge suggests.

While it may be a side effect of creating a strong community, you have to remember to never be self-contained. If you want your message to be effective, you have to make it as easy as possible to understand it.

If your language gets too technical, too pretentious, or too “exclusive,” you are running a risk of not being understood. And that doesn’t serve anyone, starting with you and your business.

6. Offer Something Unique

The problem with Vine is that it lost its appeal too fast. Yes, it was cool app for the first year or so, but then the ballyhoo died down and Vine didn’t offer any new exciting features that would differentiate it in the market. Short videos? Snapchat and Instagram work for those. Looping feature? Boomerang by Instagram has you covered. At the end, there was no real differentiation and no real use for looping six-seconds videos.

7. Promote, Boost, Forward

Twitter’s fault was that it didn’t really promote Vine in any way. After a sense of newness withered down, there were no major attempts in push Forward Vine. Clearly, Twitter has a lot going on right now in their main platform, so they put Vine on the cruise-control mode.

However, to truly see if your product has any potential, you have to Boost it relentlessly. You have to continually Forward it, highlighting benefits. Your product will never reach its fullest potential without your efforts.

8. Change With Your Audience

Learn to monitor your industry and be ready to adapt your strategies to be at the forefront, instead of playing catch-up all the time.

Great marketers are always trying to figure out what the next big thing is, and what will be the be-all-end-all of marketing strategies. The problem is, when we find them, we often think that this is it and become complacent.

We as marketers need to be agile in our approach to marketing trends. We need to realize that what’s effective one day may be completely ineffective the next, and that’s okay.
Don’t get trapped thinking you’ve figured it all out because you’ve had some success, and forget that success comes through a steady stream of testing, learning, and implementing.

9. You Have To Fail Faster And Better Than Others

When you’re an developer, entrepreneur, startup, or do anything that has to do with the every evolving nature of social media, you have to try new ideas out often. Sometimes they work and you roll with it and sometimes they don’t. When they don’t is when you have the greatest opportunity to learn: see what didn’t work, make note of what did, piece this together quickly and keep moving.

Vine failed to do this when other social media outlets started offering similar services as them. Don’t let this be you. Remember that the more you “fail”, the more you learn thus becoming better.

While it’s always sad to see a business fall, the fall always offers great lessons that can help us to learn.

Twitter is Shutting Down Vine

Twitter is shutting down video-sharing service Vine "in the coming months," the company announced Thursday. Vine, which lets you share short video clips, debuted in 2013. Twitter acquired Vine in 2012 before the service had even launched.

The news comes the same day Twitter announced it would lay off more than 300 workers, or 9% of the company's global workforce, within the company's sales, partnerships, and marketing teams.

"Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today," Twitter said in a release, adding that users will be given a heads-up and be able to download their Vines before the app shutters for good.

"Nothing is happening to the apps, website or your Vines today," Twitter said in a release, adding that users will be given a heads-up and be able to download their Vines before the app shutters for good.

"Don’t sell your company!" Vine co-founder RusYusupov, who was laid off from Twitter in October 2015, wrote in a tweet.

Acquired by Twitter in 2012, Vine started off strong, becoming the No. 1 app on the iTunes App Store only six months after joining the company. At one point, Vine had more than 200 million active users, yet it struggled to maintain traction and saw a decline in popularity in recent months.




Competition from Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube made it difficult to stand out from the pack. According to data from App Annie, Vine has since dropped to No. 284 in the top charts for free applications on iOS, down from the low 100s at the beginning of the year. It’s still fairly well-ranked (No. 24) in the Photo & Video category, but hasn’t placed on the Entertainment apps top charts since 2015.

Vine has struggled to retain its top creators. By July, over half of Vine's top 9,725 accounts had either deleted their profiles or stopped posting to the platform since the start of 2016, according to research by Makerly. This data corroborated an earlier report in The Wall Street Journal that Vine’s stars were leaving for competitors like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. One, Cameron Dallas, even snagged his own Netflix show.

Year-over-year worldwide downloads of the Vine app declined 55 percent in Q3 across both the Apple App Store and Google Play, according to Sensor Tower’s data.

This is just the latest social media app to throw in the towel. Selfie app Shots, recently rebranded as Shots Studios and is looking to create YouTube content with former Vine stars.

At the time of the report, Twitter told The Washington Post that Vine was still "an important part of our strategy." 

How to Increase the Domain Authority of Your Site: Infographic

The concept of Domain Authority was started by Moz (Previously known as SEO Moz) and represents the best prediction for how a website will perform in search engine rankings. It is calculated by combining all of Moz's other link metrics—linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc.—into a single score.

It is one of the most important Phrase known to SEOs. The greater your DA, the more likely you are to have strong traffic and high rank.

Want to know How to Increase the Domain Authority of Your Site? Well, the Infographic Explain it all.

Domain Authority Infographic

7 Best Free Tools for Creating Infographics Online

Infographics Online

Internet Surfers today are incredibly visual. Most of them would rather look at a graphics than read an entire article or report. Fortunately, there are now ways to fit just as much information into n graphic as there would normally be in a text article.

For all the importance we place on text, it's an undeniable fact that graphics is processed in the brain faster than words. Henceforward the rise of the infographic which, at its best, transforms complex information into graphics that are both easy to grasp and visually appealing. No wonder magazine readers and web visitors love them.

The days are gone where you need an entire graphics team to create them. If you have information to present, there are tools for creating infographics and charts that help you to visually bring it to life.

Here's a list of Best Free Tools for Creating Infographics.


Canva

Canva (canva.com)

Canva is filled with options, whether you are working on a project for work, personal, or social media. Each new project comes with a template for the project you choose to work on. With the dimensions done for you, you can focus your attention on creating beautiful designs in seconds.



Easel.ly

Easel.ly (easel.ly)

Easel.ly has Very basic design layouts and assets. You can drag artwork onto the canvas, and move around or add different elements as needed. New charts feature allows some basic editable charts in your design and Easy downloads for JPG and PDF versions.



piktochart

Piktochart (piktochart.com)

Piktochart is one of the best looking programs on this list. This grid-based infographics tool features pre-designed themes that you can customize with text, colors, and various shapes and design elements. Pictochart offers a free version with 7 different themes, along with pro versions that have more than 100 themes and don’t include any Piktochart branding.

Their intuitive user interface is where Piktochart truly excels. All the tools you need to create are laid out intelligently, making your new job as a “designer” so much easier.

One of the coolest aspects of this program is that they show how versatile infographics are for different projects. Whether you’re creating for a classroom, office, website, or social media setting - Piktochart gives you the heads up on how to use infographics effectively.

Infogr.am

Infogr.am (infogr.am)

Infogr.am has got the best charts. For illustrating data, there are more than 30 different types of charts to choose from. Anything from bubble charts and tree maps to simple pie charts.

You can use Infogr.am to create infographics from scratch, or you can import existing CSV or XLS files to simplify the process. The site also includes built-in sharing and embedding features so that you can make sure your graphics end up in the right place.

Vizualize

Vizualize (vizualize.me)

Vizualize.me is one of these services, an app which allows you to produce an infographic style resume. You start by filling in the sections present in the app (things like education and skills), then choose a theme and save. It’s a simple and straightforward service with some fun customization options and pretty cool results. Stick with me after the jump to see the kind of things you can create with Visualize.me.

Venngage

Venngage (venngage.com)

Venngage tool developed by the team from Visual.ly – an online dataviz sharing community, which aims to make reports easier for analysts who don’t want to install expensive software. There’s a free demo mode with most functionality, but the Professional version offers export options and the ability to publish documents privately. It also allows you to use connections to Social Media analytics with some standard report templates set up.

visme.co

Visme (visme.co)

If you’re looking for a way to bring visual content to life, then Visme could be the answer. Formerly known as Easy Web Content Presenter, the free browser-based tool allows marketers to easily create a range of visuals, including Web and mobile animations, Presentations, Infographics, Banner ads Graphs, and charts Product demos.



Which Infographic design tools have you tried? Which tools are your favorites? Post in the comments.

What are the Best Keyword Rank Checker Today?


Keyword Ranking Tools


Keyword Rank Tracking is an Essential part of every Online Marketing Campaign. It's especially important to all SEO Professional who work on Search Engine Optimization Project. Rank Tracker retrieves search engine rankings for pages and keywords, Some tools also track selected rankings over time to see which efforts are making the most impact on your SEO Campaign and show you the ranking changes.

Now, there are  a lot of free and paid rank checker out there that help SEO Professionals to track keyword rankings. Some tools that work great at certain tasks but terrible at others. Before Writing this post, I did a lot of Research to bring you the Best Keyword Rank Checker for your SEO Project.

MOZ

Moz Pro

In the Moz Pro plan, you can run up to five different campaigns at the same time. Because Moz limits the number of keywords you can track per campaign to 60, that totals 300 keywords you can track overall five campaigns, which can be limiting if you're running campaigns with different themes or that span multiple verticals. Rank tracking is thorough, though, with competitive analysis baked right in; you can see where you rank for your top keywords as well as where your top competitors rank.

Price: Moz Pricing Plan Start From $99 to $499 /month and the also offer a 30-day free trial.

SEMrush

SEMrush

SEMrush's Pro version offers keyword suggestion and keyword rank tracking. Using SEMrush, you can track up to 500 keywords over five campaigns. The tools available for keyword research can display a keyword's search volume and help you gauge how well a keyword will perform on your site. The phrase match report will show you keywords related to prime keywords that can also help drive traffic to your site, but they may be less competitive, so it will be more possible to rank with them.

Price: $69.95 – $549.95 / month

Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking

Advanced Web Ranking allows you to closely monitor your keyword's performance and Rank Tracking from three different search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You can easily sort your keyword information to see how each of these search engines views your keywords. This is useful because, while you may be hitting all of Google's targets, you may be weak in Bing's search results and missing key traffic flows from them.

Price: $49 – $499 / month, also offer FREE 30 day trial on all plans..

Ahrefs

Ahrefs

Ahref's provides estimated keywords ranking data for keyword sets on both Google and Bing/Yahoo in multiple countries (US, UK, AU, DE, FR, ES, IT, BR, RU). The tool shows following information:

  • Position 
  • Keyword 
  • CPC 
  • Estimated cost 
  • Ranking URL 
  • Global search volume A
  • dvertiser competition 
  • Last date checked 
  • Rating (estimated visitors per month based on assumed traffic distribution)
Price: $79 – $1,299 / month, and the also offer a free NEWBIE plan.


Link-Assistant Rank Tracker

Link-Assistant Rank Tracker

Link-Assistant Rank Tracker Feature:

  • Automatically check your search engine rankings.
  • Show if your site moved up or down in search results: Every time you check your keywords search engine rankings, Rank Tracker will conveniently show you the ranking difference so you can easily see if your site has moved up slipped for whatever reason.
  • Collect data from 456 different search engines: Rank Tracker supports 456 international and local search engines so you can track your rankings using the ones that matter most to you. The currently supported SEs include Google, Yahoo! and Bing with their localized versions plus hundreds of others!
Price: Free – $124 - $299 / month (one time cost – this is desktop software)


WebCEO

WebCEO

WebCEO Rank Tracker Feature:

370+ Global & Local Search Engines Rank Checking: You'll be able to check keyword rankings on more than 370 global and local search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Goo, Voila, Seznam, Rediff, and more.

Search Engine Mobile Rankings vs. Desktop Search Results: Set Web CEO Rank Tracker to monitor both desktop and mobile rankings: go to settings and add the mobile versions of every search engine that you target.

Automated Rank Checks on Schedule: Automate your rank checks with Web CEO: have them monitored quarterly, monthly, weekly.

Email Alerts about Website Ranking Changes: Set email alerts regarding website ranking changes that occur above configured levels. You can be notified if one of your keywords left the top positions, a keyword lost more than a specified number of positions, your competitors' positions improved, etc.

YouTube Rank Checker: You can add YouTube.com as a standalone search engine in your WebCEO Rank Checker settings and start tracking your YouTube rankings.

Competitor Ranking Analysis: See if your competitors have better search engine rankings for the keywords that you target. Just add the URLs of competing websites in the Competitor section of the WebCEO Rank Checker settings.

Price: $75 – $375/ month (Discounts available), also offer a limited free plan.

AuthorityLabs

AuthorityLabs

What Does Authority Labs Do?

  • Tracking keywords daily 
  • Tracking Google, Bing, and Yahoo SERPs 
  • Viewing estimated search volume (via a bar graph) for your tracked keywords 
  • Selecting a location all the way down to the zip code 
  • Viewing daily ranking charts for a selected keyword 
  • Exporting PDF reports for monthly, weekly, quarterly, *since added* date, and/or daily 
  • Comparison reports Comparing rankings against a competitor 
  • Sharing a public URL with a client for their project 
  • Exporting one domain or an entire account history in CSV format as part of a backup process 
  • Producing white label reports
Price: $75 – $99/ month (Discounts available), also offer a limited free plan.

Raven Tools

Raven Tools

Raven's Rank Tracker lets you view average keyword ranking data that comes directly from Google and Bing. You have access to Impressions and Click Through Rates (CTRs), helping you to target high value keywords for a quicker SEO win. You'll be able to show clients progress over time as you work your way through the best keyword choices based on conversion potential.

Price: $99 – $249 / month, and offer a 30 day limited free plan.



Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis keyword ranking reports allow you to see how your site is progressing using graphs and charts. These reports can be viewed online or exported as CSV and PDF files.

Price: $97 / year, also offer a free plan.

Market Samurai

Market Samurai

Market Samurai's rank tracker allows you to view your site's keyword progress as graphs, which clearly show increases and decreases in traffic. It also stores historical data on your keywords and your URLs so you can continuously view their progression. After viewing your reports, you can export data about any of your keywords as a CSV, where you can analyze it using Excel.

Price: One Time Fee $149 and also offer a free limited edition.

Positionly

Positionly

Positionly Track your keywords ranking results on the local or global market, depending on your needs. You can track everything in the most popular search engines - Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.

Analyze your progress on a daily basis and understand how rankings affect your growth.

Price: Plan starts from $16 - $84/month, has a 14-day free trial.

SERPs

SERPs

International keyword rankings: SERPs Check keyword rankings positions in Google or Yahoo from over 100 country and language combinations. SERPs free rank checker can lookup rankings in dozens of countries. Use it to spot check keyword rankings anytime.

Mobile keyword rankings: Select mobile or desktop rankings. If mobile is selected, SERPs also highlight if Google is showing the "Mobile-friendly" tag next to a URL. If you want to track mobile rankings at a larger scale, read more about our mobile rank tracking solution.

Local keyword rank checker: See rankings from specific cities or zip codes. Check one keyword in a hundred different cities.

SERP checker: SERPs tool will return the top 250 SERP results for any given keyword if the site field is left blank. That way you can see what sites rank in the top 250 for any SERP.

Price: Plan starts From $497 - $1,997 / month and a Full Featured 30-Day Trial.

RankWatch

RankWatch

RankWatch Rank Checker calculates all your keyword rankings accurately and in an instant, whether you have 50 or 50,000 keywords, we will display your current rank, highest rank and Initial rank along with search volumes in top 100 serps.Trackers Track your site rankings on 177 search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing and more using Rankwatch Rank Checker.

Price: Plan starts From $29 - $449 / month and a 14 days free trail.

SERP Scan

SERP Scan

SERP Scan Automatically Generates Search Engine Ranking Reports Clients want proof that search engine optimization works for them. Increased rankings are the best way to prove to your clients that your hard work—and their money—is making a positive impact and return on investment for their business. SERP Scan also offer Local Rank Tracking and YouTube Rank Tracking.

Price: Plan starts From $99.99 - $399.99 / month with 30-day money back guarantee.

RankScanner

RankScanner

RankScanner Keep track of your search engine rankings through time, and quickly get an idea of which SEO tactics work the best.

RankScanner Track up to 500 keywords per domain, for an unlimited number of websites. Even monitor your competitors' SEO rankings as well.

Price: Plan starts From 9€ - 49€ /month and FREE for Up to 30 Keywords.







What Keyword Ranking Tools do you use? please drop your recommendation in the comments and I'll add in this list.




Tips to Manage Your Social Media Efforts in 2015

Manage Your Social Media Efforts

2015, A Exciting Year for Social Media, As you may have already heard that Twitter and Facebook have both started testing in-stream buy buttons. It's a good chance that Facebook and Twitter users will see more buy buttons in the near future.

To help you face 2015's Social Media Marketing Challenges, I'll share tips for social media success in the new year.


Step 1: Create a Social Media Marketing Plan

Similarly to the way you do in Website Design and SEO, you must make a plan before executing. Same goes for social media. Creating a social media marketing plan will set you up for success, and will allow you to avoid any social media mistakes.

Social Media Audit
Step 2: Do a Social Media Audit

Before You Start Creating New Social Media Account, run a Social Media Audit of your current Social Media Presence Like SEO Audit involved in Search Engine Optimization Campaign. Social media audits are useful to keep all your social media channels in a row, such as social profiles and passwords.

Step 3: Deliver The Right Mix of Content

On social media, you need to deliver the right mix of content Regularly. Promotions on social media should always be balanced, whether it's for the Black Friday, Holidays or Every Day. Exception discounts are meant to be shared, and social media can multiply the reach of your promotions. At the same time, it's crucial to keep standards high for images and copy, and to vary your mix of content. People appreciate great deals, but a non-stop stream of "xx percent off" posts can come off as routine or lacking personality.

Social Media Engagement
Step 4: Pay Attention to Social Media Engagement

Skimping out on social media engagement in your social media strategy can pose a huge threat to your company’s social media presence. The Easy 3 steps to doing social media engagement right are being proactive, always listening, and being engaging.

Step 5: Build Relationships

It's All about human relationships. Every brand in the world does holiday and special event campaigns, but the ones that succeed don't do so accidentally – most of them are warm, original, and authentic. Focus on making real connections. Instead of pushing your product, consider giving your customers a platform to discuss their memories, share your company photo, or just send a genuine message wishing people all the best.

Monitor Social Media
Step 6: Monitor Your Social Media

When it comes to social media, people have all the power to say whatever they want about your company and brand. What they are saying can be positive or negative. Regardless of how or why they give you feedback, not monitoring your social media audience is a missed opportunity.

Social media monitoring allows you to gain powerful insight into your customers, competitors, and industry influencers. To take full advantage of social media listening, you need to spread your monitoring across several social media channels, and keep a constant watch for new opportunities. However, acquiring these insights takes time, and the use of the right tools.

Here are Top 15 Social Media Management Tools To Save You Time.


Google+ Insights: Google+ Insights gives you an overview of your Google+ Page Insights for the last 30 days. Your Insights show numbers for Google+ post views, post actions and new followers. You can also see how each of those numbers has changed in the past 30 days.

Facebook Insights: With the Facebook Insights Page API you can access metrics about your Facebook Page. For example you can get the total number of people who have liked your Page or the number of people sharing stories about your page.

Twitter Analytics: Twitter Analytics Measure and boost your impact on Twitter. The new and improved Twitter analytics shows tons of awesome data about follower demographics and tweet engagement.

Pinterest Analytics: With Pinterest Analytics, You can see what people like from your profile and what they save from your website. Get new data about your audience, too, so you can learn what your customers really want.

Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a social media management system for brand management. The system’s user interface takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, MySpace, WordPress, TrendSpottr and Mixi.

SocialOomph: Social Oomph started out as a service that just focused on helping Twitter users become more productive and they soon expanded to include other social platforms such as; Facebook and Linkedin.

Tweepi: Tweepi Twitter Follow Management Utility is a set of Twitter tools to add, follow and unfollow tweeps in bulk.

Spredfast: Spredfast is an social media marketing platform that helps marketers manage audience experiences and monitor brand engagement.

Sprout Social: Sprout Social is a social media management and engagement platform for businesses. Sprout enables social communication for business through three main functions: publishing, engagement and analytics. Sprout provides solutions for social media marketing, social media management, social customer service and social media analytics. Sprout’s platform offers users the ability to integrate with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Zendesk and UserVoice.

Everypost: Everypost is a social media publishing tool, enabling content publishers to post multimedia content across multiple platforms.

Bitly: Bitly is a URL shortening service. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email. Bitly makes money by charging for access to aggregate data created as a result of many people using the shortened URLs.

SocialFlow: SocialFlow uses real-time data and business rules to determine what and when to publish to your social media properties for both owned and paid social posts.

Crowdbooster: Crowdbooster measures and optimizes your social media marketing, providing powerful, easy-to-use analytics and recommendations on Twitter and Facebook.

Mention: Monitor millions of different sources and don't miss anything mentioning your keywords.

BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo is an extremely useful content-research tool. It has some incredibly powerful functionality and you should certainly test it out. There is a free version you can use to get started.


Schedule Social Media Posting
Step 7: Schedule Your Social Media Posting

Social media tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social take the stress out of managing multiple Twitter accounts by providing you the ability to schedule Tweets ahead of time.

Step 8: Target your audience better with the use of Social Media Statistics

Social media statistics allow marketers who use social media for business to guide their Social Media Strategies. With so many studies being done on social media, it would be a shame not to take advantage of these very informative numbers. This blog post puts together a healthy selection of social media statistics that every social media manager should know.

Step 9: Use Content Management Tools to manage and share your content

Even with a social media content calendar in place, content management can be tricky—especially if you’re juggling several social channels. Picking out the right piece of content to share out to your social media audience can be a daunting task for any social media manager.

Step 10: Use URL Shorteners to Track and Measure Engagements on your URLs

Tracking retweets and likes is no longer enough to give you sufficient data about social engagement. Remember that link you included in your post to drive people back to your website? Well, when you use URL shorteners, you’re provided with a trackable URL, so you can measure the success of that social media post in driving traffic to your website.

About Hashtags
Step 11: Learn about Hashtags

You’ve probably seen people use a hashtag with every word in their Tweet, or dedicate a separate Instagram comment to include hashtags. But that doesn’t mean that’s the right way to use hashtags. Educate yourself on the do’s and don’ts of how to use hashtags in this blog post that goes over the fundamentals of hashtags.

Step 12: Blog Regularly

Your regular blog is a good place to write longer-form posts when needed. To get the most out of your efforts, make sure your blog is mobile-friendly. You can test it with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Learn More about How to Fix Common Mobile Content and Usability Issues.

Step 13: Update website old content and reshare them

Old content is your friend. Find your most popular posts and those that rank highly and update them as needed. Then reshare them across your social channels to draw new attention to those articles. A good way to ensure you have the most up-to-date news is finding reliable sources of information in your industry.

Step 14: Ask Feedback

If you’d like to have more customer feedback on your product or service, give your customers a reason to help you out. Incentives can run the gamut here, and most are simple and straightforward.

Step 15: Use Infographics

People have come to love and rely on infographics for explaining information clearly and concisely. Whether you create one yourself or hire a graphic designer, be sure to include your company’s name and URL. That way your work is attributed to your business as it moves across the socialsphere.

Ask those who share your infographic to link the image back to your site so you’ll enjoy more traffic as well. When you share your infographic on your own site, make sure to include some explanatory text that deep links to previous relevant articles you’ve published.

Pin It
Step 16: Install the Pin It Button

If you want people to share your images, it’s essential to make it easy for them. By installing the Pin It button, users who like images in your post can share them on Pinterest and spread your visual content in a matter of seconds.

Step 17: Nurture Content Sharing

Whether your social media marketing department is comprised of a single person or a staff of 10, you don’t have to figure out meaningful company content on your own—ask for help from other departments. Who knows the current projects and goals better than the people who work with them daily?

For example, customer service can share success stories or ways they meet customers’ needs. Sales can tell you what was particularly hot this season. Product development can give you updates on new releases.

Tap into those resources as much as possible. Not only will you make your job easier, you’ll be sure to share the most important information.

Step 18: Participate in Conversations

If you want to connect with potential prospects, you have to engage with them. And to do that effectively, you need to know where they’re engaging most frequently on social media.

When you know where your prospects hang out, start connecting with them. If they’re on Twitter, add them to a Twitter list. Add Google+ users to a circle. Reach out to leads on LinkedIn. Read and listen to their content, and comment when you have something to add.

YouTube and Vine
Step 19: Use YouTube and Vine

Creating brand awareness with quality videos posted on YouTube and Vine has been a go-to social marketing tactic.

Marketers should keep in mind, though, that YouTube is more than a platform for sharing video footage. It’s just as important to develop a channel that is in keeping with your brand identity (e.g., using consistent imagery, thumbnails, colors and graphics within your video and your channel page design).

Vine’s short looping videos have won the attention of businesses and fit the bill for a cost-effective and innovative way to promote products and services. To get your own creative juices flowing, check out how other businesses have been using Vine.

Step 20: Revisit Your Social Media Strategy

No matter how long your business has been on social media, it’s recommended to review your goals, assess your success and make any needed changes. Pulling back from one platform and switching it up on another may be just the thing you need to freshen up your presence and become more effective.

When it comes to Social Media Marketing Efforts, what tools are your current favorites? Are there new ones mentioned here that you might want to try or I missed important ones? Let me know by your comment below.

Cool Content Creation and Marketing Tools

Content Creation and Marketing Tools

For content creators, the right tools can help in several ways, from helping you organize your thoughts, come up with great ideas, and create a wider variety of content. And for content creators who also manage contributions from others, there are tools that can help streamline the pitch, submission, and editing processes.

Here are 25 Cool Content Creation and Marketing Tools that help.

Editorial Calendars

Whether you are a one-person content creator or part of a content development team, editorial calendars can help you keep things on track. For businesses that tend to focus on revenue-generating projects, editorial calendars also keep you from forgetting to update the blog that attracts business.
Here are some tools to use.

Google Calendar

Looking for something simpler? Google Calendar also does a great job at allowing you to manage content dates with people both inside and outside of your organization. If your content creation lies within your organization only, Outlook Calendar also works.

Trello

Trello
Trello is a project management tool that can easily be utilized as an editorial calendar for content. You can create a board for your blog, multiple lists that represent different stages of the editorial process (idea pitches, article submission, editing, publishing, promoting, etc.).

Content Management Tools

Having content creators enter their content into WordPress is a great way to simplify the content submission process. For those who prefer to keep access to their CMS restricted to a small group, or those who have outside content contributors for other platforms such as YouTube, SlideShare, etc., here are some tools that will help convene content into one place.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a popular file sharing service that allows you to create shared folders with others to send content files such as documents, images, videos, and other media.

Google Drive

Google Drive (formerly Docs) is also a great file sharing service. It's especially helpful in the editorial process as multiple people can edit and leave comments on documents as well as upload files related to each piece of content.

OneDrive

OneDrive is the one place for everything in your work and personal life. It gives you free online storage for all your personal files so you can get to them from your iOS device, computer (PC or Mac), and any other devices you use.

Project Management Tools

Project Management Tools
Tools like Trello, Basecamp, and other project management tools can help you incorporate your calendar, file sharing, and editing all into one tool. Most allow for file attachments per task.

Topic Generators

If you're stuck on coming up with new content ideas, here are some tools that will help you discover what your audience is interested in and even lay out titles for you.

Content Forest Title Tool

Content Forest's Title Tool allows you to input a keyword and anywhere from 10 - 100 blog title ideas to go with it. Be sure to save the ideas and use them for future reference.

Portent's Title Maker

Portent's Title Maker
Want title ideas plus fun quips and tips? Try Portent's Idea Generator. You supply the keyword, and it supplies some witty titles to go with it.

Idea Generators

If you want to spark even more ideas for your content, here are tools you can use to see what your audience wants.

Feedly

Feedly
Start by subscribing to popular blogs in your industry using Feedly. This will allow you to view lots of titles in one screen. You will also get to see which pieces of content are the most popular on social media.

Rank Tracker

Want to know what your audience searches? Rank Tracker will give you the top suggestions for keywords that you enter, which could leave you with over 200 new content ideas.

Image Creators

Great images are vital for content - they make your articles stand out on social networks when shared by others, they can help you get traffic from both Google web and image search, they turn dull presentations into captivating ones, and so much more. Here are some tools that make image creation simple

Canva

Canva
Canva is a free tool you can use to create images for different purposes, including blog posts and social media. While there is a specific category of templates for blog images, you may want to go through other categories to find different sizes, designs, and text options.

Jing

Jing allows you to capture custom-sized screenshots for your content. You can also annotate your screenshots with text, boxes, and highlighting to make them even more valuable for your audience.

Survey Tools

Surveys can be the foundation of great content. You can use them to collect expert tips, customer insights, and much more. Here are some tools you can use to collect and analyze survey data.

Survey Monkey

Survey Monkey
SurveyMonkey is a popular survey tool that allows you to collect responses for a survey, analyze the data, and export it in PDF format for easy sharing amongst other content creators on your team.

Google Forms

If you prefer a free survey solution, Google Forms are the answer. You can create a Google Form with different question formats, and Google will automatically create a spreadsheet to collect the answers. While there is no automatic analysis or easy PDF export of the responses, it is easy enough to copy and paste the answers out of the Google Spreadsheet and into a document.

Screencasting Tools

Screen recordings can make for great video content, especially tutorials and demos. Here are the top two popular tools for creating them, depending on whether you are PC or Mac.

Screenflow

Screenflow
Screenflow is a Mac-based software for screen recording and editing for video demos, tutorials, training, and presentations. You can connect Screenflow to Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms for faster sharing and publishing.

Camtasia

Camtasia is screen recording and editing software for both Mac and Windows users.  It's great for collaborating with content creators, regardless of whether they are using Mac or Windows. It even has a feature for imposing yourself within the video with a green screen effect.

Social Curation Tools

Sometimes, you don't have to actually create content yourself - you can use social media content that's already out there and ready to publish. Here are two ways to embed social media updates and turn it into a unique piece of content highlighting the views and opinions of others on specific topics.

Embeddable Social Media Posts

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+ allow you to embed public posts from their networks. Just look for the option to embed posts, which can be accessed using the "more" link when you hover over a tweet, the triple dots at the bottom right of an Instagram photo, or the dropdown arrow at the top right of Facebook and Google+ posts.
By embedding social posts, you automatically give credit to the original source. If you can include an embedded post from your own social networks, you can encourage even more discussion about the topic on your own platform.

Storify

Storify
If you would prefer to select posts from multiple networks and embed them with one piece of code, Storify is a great curation tool to try. You can grab content from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Getty, Flickr, Instagram, and other sources.

Interview Recorders
Instead of just relying upon yourself to come up with great content, rely on others through one-on-one and group video interviews. In addition to giving your audience a new perspective on a topic, your interviewee will likely help you with the promotion of your content. Here are some tools that most are familiar with when it comes to recording interviews.

Skype

Skype allows you to conduct one-on-one and group video calls with up to five people. Use this when you want to record interviews to edit and share at a later time on your blog or YouTube channel.

Google+ Hangouts

Google+ Hangouts
For one-on-one and group video interviews with up to 10 people, try Google+ Hangouts. In addition to recording the video, you can stream it live and give your audience the ability to chat live with you and your guest(s). It's almost like having a webinar, but on a free platform.


Content Marketing Tools

Content marketing is a large part of SEO strategy today. According to new research from Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs and Marketo (B2B Enterprise Content Marketing 2015) bigger companies use more tactics to target more audiences and have a more difficult time with overall effectiveness and measuring ROI – especially compared to small businesses and B2B content marketers overall.

According to the report, enterprise marketers are more challenged with nearly every aspect of content marketing when compared with B2B marketers overall. Last year 70% of marketers were creating more content and in this year’s report, 65% are creating more. But is more better?

As it can be difficult to determine what content to publish when and where, marketers need plenty of valuable tools in their arsenal – it is even more difficult to calculate that content’s return on investment (ROI), manage the content marketing team, and curate content.

TrenDemon

TrenDemon
TrenDemon is the perfect tool if you’ve been struggling to quantify ROI of your content marketing efforts. The tool analyzes your content and provides real-time, personalized recommendations to help boost your conversions.

ClickMeeting

ClickMeeting
ClickMeeting offers a teleconferencing software that makes it easy to meet with your team and flesh out the next phase of your content marketing plan.

Share your desktop with others to make it easier to demonstrate tasks. Save your teleconferences for later viewing, in case a team member could not attend the live event. The software is also useful for creating webinars that can be used to train team members on any company specific workflows. Since the webinars can be saved and shared later, you can create quick and easy a training library to make onboarding new team members easier.

CoSchedule

coschedule tool
CoSchedule is a platform that allows you to work your social media activity into your editorial calendar, right within the WordPress platform. Multiple people can access the calendar if need be, and tasks can be assigned so you can easily see who is responsible for what. By managing your editorial calendar and social media posts in a single place, you save time.

The tool makes it easy to re-share old posts and bring fresh traffic. It integrates with many other tools besides WordPress, tools like Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Buffer, and more.

Curata

Curata

Curata offers content curation software and a content marketing platform to make your content management more efficient. It helps you cut through the “noise” on the Internet and find out what’s most likely to be relevant and interesting to your audience no matter your niche. Then, it gives you the chance to go through the list of resources, take notes and organize all so you can choose what to share, what comments to add, and where you want to share it.

Curata makes it easy to take the content you find and share it across all your channels on whatever schedule you choose. It integrates with many popular content management systems, social channels, and email marketing platforms to make sharing content easy.


With all these tools, content creation and marketing management becomes much easier. You’ll have everything you need to easily track and monitor ROI, communicate with the team behind content creation, curate content, and more. what do you think?