10 Time-Saving Tools for Managing Your Social Media Following

Keeping up with emerging social media networks is challenging. It's easy to feel like you're spreading yourself thin.

That said, maintaining a healthy social media following on all of your networks is even morechallenging. You can't help but want more followers, but if you're going to extreme lengths just to build up that number with empty names and faces, it's not worth the time and resources.After all, effective engagement occurs with real, interested followers, not eggs and inactive accounts. 

If you want to streamline your following and uncover analytics that can be used to refine your strategy, you need the right set of tools. Ones that actually work.  

To help, I've collected 10 tools that can help you keep on top of your social media following. All the tools vary in price and network specificity, so you're sure to find something that meets your team's unique needs. 

10 Time-Saving Tools for Managing Your Social Media Following

1) Crowdfire 

Price: Free

Applicable network(s): Twitter & Instagram

Crowdfire started with a simple desire that many Twitter users had: an easier way to manage your followers.

Nobody likes when someone follows you, only to unfollow you later to improve their follower to following ratio, am I right? It starts to feel like a vanity game.

Luckily, Crowdfire has created a tool to help you identify relevant users to follow -- like ones in your industry, or people who are interested in competitors. In doing so, it's become much easier to build a more meaningful audience. Here's what else the tool can do:

• Find inactive users and unfollowers
• Find relevant users to follow using “Copy Followers” feature
• Keep track of how your social media updates influence your follower/unfollower stats
• Compare the performance of two accounts using the Comparison tool

2) Commun.it

Price: Starts at $9.99/month

Applicable network(s): Twitter

Commun.it's main premise is that not all Twitter followers are the same. It's worth it to find “high value” followers -- people who are more likely to connect with your brand. The tool allows users to quickly and easily filter through all of the noise on Twitter so they can prioritize the interactions that really matter. Here are a few of the tools most noteworthy features:

• Sorts tasks by priority
• Identifies “high value” followers
• Automates insights from analytics into campaigns

3) FollowerWonk 

Price: Free for personal use, $99/month for Pro

Applicable network(s): Twitter

There is often key information about people in their Twitter bios that can be used to learn more about them. These short introductions to a person’s Twitter feed aim to distill the purpose of their Twitter existence into 160 characters. Often times, these bios are even search engine optimized. FollowerWonk helps you take advantage of those optimized bios and find the people who want to be found. Here's what you can expect:

• Search bios to turn up relevant Twitter users
• Track and sort followers
• Compare individual followers
• Match activities to gains and losses

4) SimplyMeasured

Price: Starts at $500/month

Applicable network(s): All

This social analytics tool has been designed with brand marketers and social teams in mind ... and it shows. SimplyMeasured's platform helps give businesses of all sizes more advanced insights into their social media -- from the major networks like Facebook to smaller networks like Vine. These insights can then be used to build out successful programs and strategies that draw in the right audience. Here are a few of the tool's most valuable features:

• Audience analysis across all platforms
• Customer service metrics measurement on Twitter
• Social and website traffic measurement from Google
• Unlimited data storage at no additional charge
• Data accessibility via Excel
• Customizable report themes

5) Social Quant 

Price: $50/month for single user account

Applicable network(s): Twitter

Social Quant’s claim to fame is having one of the best auto-follow algorithms out there. While autofollowing without intent can dilute your audience and make them less invested in your brand, Social Quant's algorithm is designed to find only the best people out there to follow. Here's more on what the tool does:

• Identifies real and relevant people on Twitter to follow
• Automatically synthesizes data of your own followers to refine your audience
• Finds people who are most likely to be engaged with your content

6) Iconosquare 

Price: Starts at $4.90/month

Applicable network(s): Instagram

Considering Instagram has only recently begun to widely incorporate functions specifically to businesses, the landscape of third-party platforms around the photo sharing app is a bit sparse. That said, Inconosquare is one of the most robust of those available. 

The tool gives users the ability to track follower growth, the unfollow rate, and how many reciprocal followers they have. In addition, the tool also makes it easy for users to:

• Track hashtag performance
• Track what the best times to post are
• Set up a plugin for posting Instagrams to your FB page
• Set up a vanity URL for your Instagram content

 

7) Tweepi 

Price: $7.49/month

Applicable network(s): Twitter

Getting rid of the unfollowers is pretty easy for Twitter tools nowadays, as it’s a common tactic for refining your base. However, there are some accounts that are following back that you probably don’t want. Sure, they make the follower count look great, but if they’re an unengaged bunch, it’s an empty number and it’s not helping your ROI in the end.

Tweepi helps you identify dormant accounts and flush them out. And, if there’s someone who’s blatantly offensive in your audience and you want to get rid of them, you can with Tweepi by forcing them to unfollow you. Here's a simple rundown of some of the tools most noteworthy features:

• Flush out inactive accounts
• Get rid of undesirable followers
• Search for users using geolocation capabilities

8) Social Inbox

Price: Included in all of HubSpot's plans starting at $200/month

Applicable network(s): Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin & Google+

Social media brings a human element back to marketing. Each platform provides businesses with an opportunity to interact, build relationships, and learn from those they follow ... but it can get noisy. HubSpot's Social Inbox App gives users the tools they need to manage their day-to-day interactions and engagement in a way that makes sense. Here's a quick look at some of Social Inbox's capabilities:

• Get a quick hit list of new followers and content that's resonating
• Schedule and publish posts informed by clicks and interactions data to keep your following engaged
• Tie interactions back to contacts in your HubSpot database
• Create targeted streams for simplified social monitoring

9) ManageFlitter 

Price: Free, starts at $12/month for business accounts

Applicable network(s): Twitter

One of the biggest challenges of social media, and especially Twitter, is finding out when people are online and looking at your content. ManageFlitter has a built in tool to take the guesswork completely out of finding when your followers are online. Here's a look a few important tasks you can accomplish with the tool:

• Make smart lists of followers/followees
• Search Twitter bios
• Find out when your followers are online the most

10) Likeable Hub 

Price: Free, premium plans start at $19.99/month after free trial

Applicable network(s): Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn

Managing social media can be a grind, and it takes time. No matter what tricks you have, nothing beats good content. Likeable Hub is all about helping businesses provide great content, and promote it effectively.

With customizable, industry-specific content, it makes for your business to attract a qualified following -- one that sees the value in your messages. The content is particularly meaningful because it’s not auto-generated, but instead carefully curated by real people. Here's a closer look at what the tool really does:

• Builds audience with Turbopost™ post amplification
• Tracks different topics on Twitter to find out what your audience cares about
• Tracks page growth and engagement
• Provides a content library to discover content that works best in your industry

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Blogging: Stop Following, Start Exploring

The title “Stop following. Start Exploring.” is the slogan for a popular Indian educational portal Shiksha (means education), but it also holds true for bloggers. As a newbie bloggers, most of us start with choosing a niche for our blogs. Some of us don’t even know what niche we should choose. Whether, it should be a multi-niche blog or  a single niche blog, etc.  Now even if you somehow figure out the niche you are interested in and created a blog with related domain name, the next step is to curate contents for the blog.

The old saying in the blogging world is “content is the king”. But, how true is that? I would say very true and content is the only thing, which differentiate your blog from the millions of blogs on the internet. Now to create contents for your blog, the popular method is to bookmark popular websites related to your niche and try to figure out what is working for them and what is not. For example, if you are interested in gadget niche you may follow something like GSMArena, Anandtech, Phonecurrent and create a similar website.

Bookmarking popular websites isn’t a bad idea nor analyzing them. However, following them extensively to the core where you start focusing on only a few popular blogs and trying to be like them will not take you anywhere. After a year of blogging, you will find yourself nowhere in the crowd and you may ultimately quit blogging. And the popular blogs which you were following w

Why? Because, you chose to follow them, and they chose to explore.

#Stop Following 

No popular websites on any niche became popular overnight. There are various factors, which have contributed to their success. They have started early, they chose a niche which wasn’t populated by that time and most of them are godfathers of their niche. They started from the scratch and were really passionate about what they are doing.

Now among all these factors, there is one more thing which has made them what  they are now. Now, before I spill the beans, let me ask you one thing.

Which popular blogs, those bloggers used to follow? Note that there weren’t many popular blogs that time and almost everyone was a beginner.

The answer is none. Instead of following anything, they choose to explore things, which were related to their niche. They still do the same and we still do the same as well. That is following them.

I began my blogging journey with the same attitude of following some of the most popular blogs related to technology niche. I started as a writer for tech blogs, which helped in learning about blogging. Later, I created my own blog in the technology niche. Fortunately, after 6 months of blogging I was in better position than most of the tech bloggers in the same field who started even before a year than my blog went live.

You may call it a luck or just coincidence, I was able to choose topics, which were low competitive as well as had high search volume without using any SEO software. I did apply some basic SEO techniques, which worked perfectly well with the blog. After 8 months of blogging, the blog was getting around 300K pageviews a month, among which 90% of the traffic was organic, 2% from social media and 8% from referral.

Woohoo, happy ending, right? Nope.

Now after 2 years of starting the blog, the blog is still in a strong position, but couldn’t bring the satisfaction a genuine blogger will look from his blog. If I ask myself how exactly is my blog different from thousands of other technology blogs on the internet? How many topics I started before anyone in the web world and found solutions for them? well, I barely could answer anything. Except the fact that it has grown large, brings good revenue and I never applied any Black hack techniques. Is that enough? Well, at least not for me.

#Start Exploring 

Since I keep creating new blogs every now and then, this time I thought of building a blog, which purely contains solutions or topics discovered by me (mostly). The blog is Technicalnotes and as the name indicates, it is a tech blog and technology is the niche I love.

For this blog, I stopped following and started exploring. I also did not use any off page SEO tactics to make it achieve good rankings in search results. It wasn’t necessary because the contents in the blog were first to be published in any blog on the internet. As far as link building is concerned, if you are the first one to publish anything important, the links will flow automatically as the popular tech blogs will pick your contents and link back to them as reference or source. Basically, you are making them follow you, instead of following them.

Now talking about the result so far (though, it’s too early), in last few months the blog has grown much faster than I thought and the results are impressive. It has quality  and unique posts. The links coming to the blog are natural and at the end of the day you will have something original, which you have created by exploring things instead of following.

Conclusion 

If you are a newbie, have started blogging in 2015-2016 and looking for a long-term goal, I would recommend you to start exploring things on your own than simply following the footsteps of the popular. Try to create your own contents, do extensive research and then publish your post. It may look difficult in the beginning, but you will grow to be a much experienced and mature blogger with an opinion over the years.

Blogging is a crowded place with more number of spammers coming with new tactics to trick the Google algorithm every day. Now if you don’t create a unique blog with unique contents, then there is no reason for Google to rank your blog higher than the blogs which has contents similar to your blog and have published it before you could. And the possibility is that Google may just destroy all your hard work by penalizing it for the crime you didn’t commit while targetting the spammy blogs. Now it’s completely your choice to create something which is worth having and boosting about or just follow the masses.

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How to Improve Your Social Media Monitoring and Understand Influencers

Success in social media marketing comes from consistency and understanding your audience. Consistency is the easy part here, just stay focused on your campaigns and keep working hard. But how do you understand your audience, and more importantly, how do you make a lasting impression on them, and eventually convert them into buying customers? This is where metrics comes into play. There are a lot of tutorials and guides that explains different metrics and how they affect your social media marketing. So we will not insist on that for now. Instead, we will talk about social media monitoring and how you can use it to find and interact with influencers.

Why Social Media Monitoring?

Monitoring your social media campaigns is a vital element in marketing via social media platforms. It might seem like a secondary objective, but, in fact, it is one of the most important factors to follow and understand. This also allows you to identify the so-called influencers in your niche. Understanding influencers is important because they can make you or break you with their following. Think of them as the celebrities of social media, and understanding them can help you win their endorsement for your social media campaigns.

Source: Unsplash

Social Media Monitoring Tools

The whole concept of influencer marketing is based on communication, and this is where monitoring the social media feeds comes into play. By putting in place effective measures for monitoring your social media marketing efforts you can communicate with potential buyers, interested parties and influencers. Monitoring can be done via multiple different platforms, and many different experts in the field recommend different methods of monitoring. We will go through a few of the most popular tools, how to leverage them to your advantage and finally, how to make influencers notice you and help you in promoting your social media campaigns.

BUFFER

Buffer is one of the best-known players in the game to date. They took the market by storm and are still controlling many of the major social feeds for numerous large companies and agencies alike. It offers a free version of their services, but for a more efficient and dominant control over multiple social media platforms and accounts, you might want to consider upgrading to their paid plan. Buffer allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your social media efforts in relation to the number of replies and impressions they receive, allows you to communicate directly with your audience and provides you with informative statistics and graphics to easily identify optimal times for posting, commenting and everything in between.

HOOTSUITE

Hootsuite is probably the largest social media management tool that corporations all around the world use to enhance their brand management in the social platforms. It allows you to listen, measure engagement, collaborate and securely operate your social media monitoring efforts from a single easy to use dashboard. Sounds temptingly convenient, doesn’t it? Well, that it is. There is a good reason Hootsuite has managed to grab major corporations and turn them into clients, with examples like HBO, Virgin Group and Facebook using their services to manage their brands on the social media platforms. Enhanced reports are provided to social media managers, which disclose all of their strengths and weaknesses, from posting times to audience engagement. Hootsuite also excels in influencer marketing, because you can identify influencers using the Klout score each user has. We’ll discuss Klout later on in more detail.

BRANDWATCH

Brandwatch is the oldest of the three, and going stronger than ever. It might not have had such an explosive start as the two other tools mentioned above, but it certainly has a strong and loyal user base. Companies such as Seat, PepsiCo and Virgin Australia are using Brandwatch to provide them with analytics and monitoring over their social media and brand image. Brandwatch differs from the other two in one major feature, it focuses heavily on the analytics side. The analytical powers of this tool go way beyond your standard social media management tools, as you can easily identify influencers, gather data automatically from all over the web with support to 27 languages, respond to your social media audience and solve PR problems instantaneously. However, the robust features come in at a price, which is a hefty $800 per month to begin with. But the good news is, they have an integration with Hootsuite, allowing you to make use of the robust analytical powers of Brandwatch and manage your social media with Hootsuite. For anyone interested in the market's most efficient social media monitoring tools, a combination of these two will definitely get you on your A game. Combine these with Mass Planner and you have the perfectly automated social media campaign together with robust analytics and effective monitoring.

Source: Unsplash

 

How To: Influencer Marketing

Now that you are familiar with some of our favorite tools for monitoring your social media marketing efforts and communicating with your audience, it’s time to dig deeper on influencer marketing. Social media, just like any other form of media, or even many sports, have their own influencers, listened to and respected by a mass following. Think of Warren Buffet giving out investment tips or recommendations, but just a niche specific and social media focused version of an event like that. Having an influencer supporting your brand is a powerful asset to have to support your brand.

We mentioned Klout score earlier, and now it’s time to explain it in more detail. Klout is a company that ranks social media users based on their influence. It uses different metrics, which include the very same ones we mentioned in our previous article, and give each user a Klout score. The higher the score, the more powerful the influencer. Kloutis a handy tool to identify influencers, and Hootsuite for one allows you to see the Klout score of each person engaging with your brand via social media. Identifying social media influencers is the mandatory first step to turning them into powerful allies.

Another way of identifying influencers in your niche is to use Google, for example finding influencers in the food niche could be done by searching for “Food blog” on Google, and opening up the few blogs that come up first. Usually, a combination of both methods can give you the best results.

After you have identified the influencers commanding a followership in your niche, it’s time to start communicating with them. Engage them in their blogs, on articles they post both in their blog and in social media. Creating a first impression of you being an open and approachable brand is important, and remember to offer them value. Don’t waste their time, but engage them with creative and useful comments. This type of communication and engagement can then be turned into influencer marketing with the help of your newly found associate.

Conclusion

Managing your social media is much easier when using the proper tools for the job, and now we have given you an insight into the three top tools for monitoring your social media. Using any of these three to help with your efforts is a guaranteed boost in traffic and engagement. Use monitoring and social media listening to identify influencers in your field. Start building genuine relationships with them and you will have a powerful marketing strategy in your hands.

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5 Ways to Increase Subscribers to Your Blog, Social Media, Video, Podcast Channels

Build it and they will come never worked. Many marketers and business leaders waste loads of time and money on creating stand alone silos of content without ever having a strategy for how they are actually going to get eyeballs on it or ears listening.

Creating content is simply the first step. It’s the easy part. Everyone including their mom and even some of their dogs are creating content. You can find a video, YouTube channel, podcast, blog, Periscope, Meerkat, Snapchat, Instagram feed on almost any topic you can think of.

The challenge is not in creating the content but instead in getting people to read, listen, watch and engage with your content in the first place.

The second and even more important challenge is inspiring them to come back for more. You want subscribers, people who sign up to receive your content because they want it.

One great way you can break through the noise and grab real attention from your audience is to inspire people to subscribe to your content. Increasing and growing your subscriber base across your email newsletters and updates, RSS feeds, blogs, video channels, podcasts, and social networks will help you nurture relationships, grow community, and even increase brand loyalty!

Would you like to increase the number of subscribers to your content? Would you like to have hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of people sign up to receive updates from you automatically? This means they choose to receive updates from you. They WANT your content.

The 130th episode of the Social Zoom Factor podcast provides 5 easy ways you can increase subscribers to your content.

Does this sound familiar?

• You have created loads of blog posts but nobody is reading them
• You don’t know if anyone is reading your content
• You have a podcast but not sure if anyone is listening to it
• You struggle with getting people to view the videos you have invested in
• You don’t know how to build community
• You don’t know how to build a loyal base of readers, viewers and listeners

This podcast will help you activate your audience to invest in a relationship with you as well as increase the ROI on your content marketing, digital marketing and social media investment.

In this 25 minute podcast you will learn:

• 5 Ways to Increase Subscribers
• How to use RSS feeds to nurture relationships
• Using email marketing to grow subscribers and increase ROI across numerous marketing channels
• Leveraging video, podcasting, white papers and useful tips and kits to increase subscribers
• How to introduce your audience to different communication mediums / subscriptions you use via one single method
• How to organically attract your right audience with relevant, contextual content
• The power of earning trust to increase subscribers

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