Do you want some actionable tool and technology tips that you can implement to-day?
You need to have a clear strategy in place to be effective with social media, but the tools and technology will provide a lot of help implementing this strategy.
In the following article, we have outlined 51 Social Media tips related to tools and technology to make your job easier.
1. Check popular content on social media using Buzzsumo
If you want to find out what content is shared out on social media the most, perform a search using Buzzsumo.
Go to Buzzsumo and type in a search based on content you are interested in. Buzzsumo will then show you a list of relevant content with the most shared content appearing at the top.
In the following example, I searched for Dublin Web Summit (a tech conference in Ireland).
2. Get email subscribers when people are leaving your site using OptinMonster
Imagine if you were able to pop up a message to your site’s visitors just about the time when they were about to leave your site. They can browse all day long without any interruption but as soon as they go to leave you ask them if they want to subscribe.
Well, you don’t have to imagine it anymore. Check out OptinMonster which allows you to do exactly this. It was developed by Syed Balkhi who is the founder of WPBeginner (the biggest and best resource on the web for WordPress).
3. Check for broken links on your blog using BrokenLinkCheck.com
When you post content sometimes you have links that don’t work, or they do work but then subsequently break when the page you reference is deleted.
When Google is crawling your site it checks the links. You don’t want to have bad links for Google and you certainly don’t want to have them for your visitors either. So check out this online broken link checker tool and fix up your links!
4. Use SqueezeCMM to track links shared on Social Media
If you post 2 links on your Facebook page and view your analytics you won’t be able to tell which link got the traffic. With SqueezeCMM you can create custom links for different social networks for the same piece of content.
Within SqueezeCMM you can then track where people are clicking on the link. An alternative method to SqueezeCMM is Google URL Builder, but SqueezeCMM is easier to set up.
5. Check your domain authority using Open Site Explorer
Your domain authority is a number from 0 to 100. The higher the number the easier it is to rank on Google for content around your niche.
So it’s really important to know your domain authority and also your competitors (or any other site’s) domain authority. To increase your domain authority, you need to build up links from other sites that have a much higher domain authority than you! So being able to check any site’s authority is key.
Open Site Explorer will show you what the domain authority is for any website.
In the image above you’ll see domain and page authority. Every page on your website also has a page authority. The linking root domains is the number of unique websites that link to your content. This is also important.
6. Set up weekly reports using Google Analytics
One thing that focuses the mind is if you start getting weekly reports from Google Analytics which summarizes what happened over the previous week. You really want to see if that blog post drove any traffic, is your social media activity working and more.
Set up a weekly report that will be delivered to you via PDF.
7. Manage your email subscriptions using unroll.me
If you are like me you are subscribed to too many sites. Unroll.me will help by displaying all your subscriptions in one place and it allows you to unsubscribe to a group of them at the same time.
You’ll be amazed by the amount of sites you actually subscribe to.
8. Build a following on Twitter using ManageFlitter
One of the best ways of building a following on Twitter is to follow people. But you don’t want to follow just anyone. Ideally you are following people that are relevant to your niche and are likely to follow you back.
ManageFlitter provides really useful functionality to find relevant people on Twitter.
In the example below we are looking for people that have put ‘Social Media Manager’ in their Twitter bios, based in England and have over 1000 followers.
9. Use Social Crawlytics to find out what content is popular on your competitors’ site
One way of writing popular content is finding out what is popular already. You are not out to copy the content but you could come up with a different twist on the content, provide more up to date content or just better content.
Social Crawlytics will go through your site, or your competitors, and analyze all your blog content. It will then display the number of shares each piece of content got. This is really useful to know what’s popular.
10. Â Use Camtasia or Screenflow for Video Editing
When you record your video and you want to edit it you’ll need some good software. Camtasia and ScreenFlow are powerful tools that both provide excellent editing facilities and neither are difficult to use or expensive.
You can cut or add pieces of video, put in opening/closing slides, add text, animations, music, and much more. If you spend some time with these tools you’ll end up with some really professional looking videos.
11. Check out your Twitter and Instagram analytics using Twtrland
Twtrland is a Twitter analytics and Instagram analytics tool. You start off by searching based on skill, name or location and then select the relevant profile.
You can then view great analytics for that profile.
Another really interesting part is the search for people of influence. You can search based on skill and location and the results are ordered based on influence. There is a also a monitoring solution where you can monitor keywords.
12. Optimize your blog posts for Google
If you use WordPress (about 20% of all websites worldwide) the best plugin to use for optimizing your content is WordPress SEO by Yoast.
When you write a post WordPress SEO will ask you for a focus keyword(s) that you want to rank on. It will then show you where you need to put those keywords.
There is also an advanced section that provides more specific details on how to further optimize your content, but even the basic recommendations are really useful.
13. Modify your images using PicMonkey
Picmonkey is a very simple photo editing tool. One piece of functionality that is really useful is the ability to add text to an image.
This is particularly important as Pinterest becomes an ever growing source of traffic. But when people pin an image to Pinterest it’s not immediately evident what the image is related to unless you add text to the image.
14. Find out what to share on ShareGrab
Are you struggling to find content to share on Twitter or Facebook? Â On Sharegrab you specify your competitors and ShareGrab will display the most popular content that was recently posted by them on Facebook.
15. Implement a content distribution network
If you are in the US and you are browsing a blog that is based in the UK this will generally be slower than browsing a blog based in the US.
To improve load times of your site across the world sign up for a hosting provider that supports CDN (content distribution network). The CDN will synchronize your website across many different servers around the world. Then for each user that browses your website, the content will be served up from the nearest location to them to ensure the best browsing speed.
16. Check availability of your business name using KnowEm
If you are starting up a new business it’s no longer enough just to have your company name as your domain name. You also need to consider Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many other platforms.
You may not want to operate on all these platforms today but what about in a years time when you’re successful and you find out that someone else has taken your name.
KnowEm does a search for your name across a variety of services to find out if your name is available.
17. Link from your old posts to your new posts
Getting links to your content is, and always will be, valuable. Quite often when we write content we link from our existing content to external content or content on our own site.
But what about going back to older posts and linking to the newer posts? Older posts will typically still have some value from a Google perspective so why not link them to newer content? Also, Google follows links so it will give you an extra chance  of getting your content indexed quickly.
Tip:Â If I was writing a post on social media tools I’d go to Google and type in ‘social media tools site:razorsocial.flywheelsites.com’. Google will do a search for content on my website that already contains social media tools. These are good candidates for linking.
18. Create an animated video using Sparkol
Sparkol is a cool tool for creating animated videos. Using a template (or starting from scratch) you can create cool animations to get your idea across.
Check out our post on creating animated videos for more details on this and other video animation tools.
19. Analyze who your competitor is talking to on Twitter using Twitonomy
Wouldn’t it be nice to know who your competitor is talking to most on Twitter? If they are talking to them a lot it’s probably people that you should be talking to also.
Twitonomy will go through their Twitter account and work out who they are replying to or retweeting the most.
Note: This could be done for your competitors, key influencers in your industry or yourself!
20. Use Click to Tweet to encourage more Tweeting
Michael Brenner (b2b Marketing Insider) recently had a post about content marketing trends. Beside each short snippet of information he provided a ‘click to tweet’ button to encourage people to tweet about it.
He used a tool called Clicktotweet which provides a very simple mechanism for creating a tweet based on your content and sending it out.
21. Encourage users to share your images with JQuery PinIt
One way of encouraging people to share your website images onto Pinterest is to be more creative with your images. Â But assuming you’ve done that then it’s a good idea to provide an easy way to pin the images.
JQuery Pinit Button for images is a WordPress plugin that displays a Pinterest symbol when you hover over images so that your visitors can easily pin the images to their boards.
22. Recycle evergreen posts using SocialOomph
When you write blog content that’s evergreen (doesn’t go out of date) you need to promote it on an ongoing basis.
One way of doing this is to set up a content reservoir within SocialOomph. You add your content onto the queue and Socialoomph will automatically pick off the content and deliver it according to predefined times you have specified on a continuous basis.
For example, if you had 100 blog posts you could say that SocialOomph takes one from the queue every 12 hours. That means it would be 50 days before the posts are sent a second time.
23. Create lists with List.ly
When you create a list in your blog post it’s a static list. List.ly is a list building tool that allows you to create a list that your community can vote on or add items onto the list.
They can also take the list and embed it on their own site.
24. View your hashtag across multiple platforms
When we think of hashtags we’re inclined to think of Twitter more than other platforms. However, hashtags are becoming more popular on other platforms also.
Tagboard allows you to search for a hashtag and display results based on multiple platforms. So I can see images on Instagram or updates on Facebook that uses the hashtag.
25. View Hashtag analytics based on an event or Tweetchat
Tweet Binder is a hashtag analytics tool. You enter in the hashtag and Tweet Binder will show you fantastic stats on the hashtag.
You can view great analytics such as a graph of traffic based on the hashtag, the more influential users sharing content with the hashtag, a view of the links and images shared, and much more.
26. Implement a feature box for subscriber conversion
A feature box is a banner image that appears across the top of your web page. You generally see it on your homepage but it can also be on other pages.
The feature box is used to stand out on the page and improve conversion. One good way of using it is to increase email subscribers.
If you create a good feature box expect to get 5% or more conversion from it. Here is what it looks like.
27. Find the WordPress theme a site is using
Did you ever come across a WordPress site and wonder what theme they are using on their site (theme = the code behind the overall structure, layout and style of the site).
Check out WordPress theme detector. That’s what you’re looking for!
28. Review Buffer Analytics
Buffer is a great application for sharing content. But while we’re inclined to use Buffer to share content, we don’t look at the results of that sharing.
Buffer provides some very useful analytics on their website, that shows what happened to the content that you buffered. Well worth checking out.
29. Use Topsy for Research – NOT AVAILABLE ANYMORE
Topsy is a search engine which is excellent for research. For example in the image below I search for ‘social media monitoring’ and the results showed the top articles on the web (i.e. the ones that had the most links to the article).
If you want to search Twitter it has all tweets indexed back to 2006!
30. Compare the speed of your site against your competitor
Use a tool such as Pingdom to compare the speed of your website.
31. Monitor your blog visitors using Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange tracks who is on your site and what they are doing. You can view the information in real-time and you can even interact with the visitors while they are on your site. It comes with a 7 day trial so within 7 days you’ll be getting value.
32. Set up your Google Analytic’s goals
If you use Google Analytics for analyzing traffic on your website you really need to set up goals. A goal could be a purchase of your product, sign up for a trial, become an e-mail subscriber, and much more.
With goals you can start to track what visitors come in, what’s converting, where they come from and much more. Useful and essential!
33. Link to your content within your guest post
If you write a guest post you generally get a link back to your site from within your bio. However, it’s much better to get a link within the content.
The most important thing is to make sure that the link is very relevant and adds value to the content. But also tell the person you are writing the post for that you’ve included this link. If it adds value they generally won’t mind you adding it.
34. Use annotations in Google Analytics
When you get sudden dips or peaks in traffic you might forget about what they were for in a few months time.
Within Google Analytics you can click on points of the graph and add some commentary related to that particular point. This means that this information is now available in the future.
35. Check out Simply Measured free reports
Simply Measured provide a good range of social media reports (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more) for free. Have a look at the selection of the reports and you are bound to find one of value to you.
36. Use Zapier to automate tasks
Zapier is a social media automation tool. You create a recipe which consists of a trigger and an action. The trigger event is when something happens and this kicks off an action automatically.
For example, when a video is uploaded to YouTube a Tweet is automatically generated.
37. Join in on a Twitter chat using TweetChat
A Twitter chat is a conversation on Twitter at a specific time on a particular subject and based on a hashtag. When you’re trying to track conversations it can get quite difficult so you need some tools to help.
TweetChat allows you to pause the tweets so you get time to read them, reply (with automatic hashtag), remove retweets, remove people from the list of tweets you see and much more.
38. Optimize your blog posts in these areas
Pick the keywords you want to rank on and make sure they are included in the following:
- Title (also known as a meta tag)
- Description (also known as a meta tag)
- Page name
- Heading 1
- Content (a couple of times)
That’s not everything but it’s a good starting point.
39. Use Ubersuggest to get ideas for posts
Ubersuggest is a good tool for keyword research but also great to get blog post ideas. You type in keywords and you’ll see hundreds of potential areas to write about. Here’s a summary of just a small amount of the 300 results returned for social media monitoring.
40. Implement Twitter Cards
Twitter cards means that you provide additional information to Twitter when someone shares out your content. For example you tell Twitter about an image in your post. This helps highlight your post when it’s shared.
41. Schedule your Google+ posts using Do Share for Chrome – NOT AVAILABLE ANYMORE
The options for scheduling the sharing of content to your Google+ personal profile are quite limited. One option is to use the Chrome plugin called DoShare that allows you schedule the posts. The only issue is that the browser must be open when the time comes around to deliver the post.
42. Work out the best time to Tweet using SocialBro
Socialbro have smart functionality which goes through your Twitter account and works out when your Twitter users are more likely to be online. It’s really interesting to see and you’ll be surprised to discover that you’ll never see more than 50% of your followers online at the same time and quite often this will be as low as 10 or 15%. So don’t worry too much about sharing your content multiple times!
When you hover over each image you’ll see the percentage online, bigger circles means more followers online.
43. Add Moz Toolbar to your browser
If you want to rank on Google for keywords you want to know who your competition is for a search on those keywords.
Moz Toolbar is a plugin that you install on your browser and when you do a search on Google it will show you the domain and page authority for the sites that appear in search results for the keywords you want to rank on.
These numbers are out of 100. You need to compare your domain authority with the websites in the list. If they have content that is optimized for this keyword and they have a much higher domain authority and a high page authority then it’s going to be harder to rank for this content.
Note: I don’t use this plugin when I’m browsing the internet on a day to day basis. Â I have a separate browser with this plugin and only use it when I’m researching.
44. Tinypng
Tinypng is a tool for reducing the size of your png images. It works great and it’s hard to notice the difference in image quality!
45. Get your images from Photopin
When you want images for your blog or website Photopin is a good place to go. When you do a search for images it will show the paid options at the top but if you scroll down a little bit you’ll find many images that you can use for free. The only stipulation is that you link back to the person that provided the image.
46. Implement Flare for Sharing
Flare is what you see on the left hand side of this blog post. It allows you to show a vertical and/or horizontal share bar. With the vertical bar as you scroll down a blog post it will move with you.
Digg Digg is quite similar to Flare but Digg Digg doesn’t work on a mobile device. Flare does.
Note. This is a WordPress only plugin.
47. Generate business with vCita
When you have visitors to your website and they are reading your excellent content this is a good opportunity to convert them. If you look at Lilach Bullock’s site you’ll see that Lilach pops up a box which offers a free consultation for 15 minutes or a paid one for 45 minutes. This is a great way of generating leads and sales for your business. Check out Vcita.
48. Download the Conversion Pack from Rich Page
Rich Page is a conversion rate optimization expert. On his site he has just made a conversion optimization kit available which is well worth downloading. It contains tools, tips, and much more. We can always improve conversion on our site!
49. Optimize your images for SEO
When you are uploading your images for your posts make sure you include relevant keywords in your title, description, alt tag (read by Google etc). Read this article on optimizing images.
50. Search social media channels using Google
If you want to search social media, sometimes it’s better to use Google. For example if you want to search for a page on Facebook the search results are not great.
However, if you go to Google and search for the Facebook page’s name it will work a lot better.
Here’s an example search. The parameter ‘inurl’ just means that I want to make sure certain words are in the web address. Any pages on Facebook have the word ‘pages’ in the web address (URL).
51. Our Final tip..
We are social media tool and technology specialists and this is the best place to get independent advice on both. Subscribe to our site and keep in touch with us. We will help your business.
Subscription option below this post, on top of this page, to the right of this page and in the footer (you see…there’s another tip, if you want to get subscribers you need to have multiple subscription options with a clear call to action).
Summary
Wow, that was a whopper post! I’m hoping that you can pick off at least a couple of social media tips that you can implement immediately.
What tips are useful for you? Would you like to add any onto the list?
I would love to hear from you!!!!