Social Media Tools YOU Really Need?

There's no shortage of social media tools and apps designed to make your life as a social media manager easier..

Jayson DeMers recently wrote a list on some of his favorites, and personally, I know I'd be lost without some of them..

Related Article: Publishing Your Book On Social Media?

Almost every app promises to improve the ROI of your campaign -- or at least cut a few hours' worth of tasks off your plate -- but most apps offer overlapping functionality, and almost all of them cost a monthly fee to use.

If these tools were free and easy to navigate, you could maintain a long list of them for planning and executing your campaign, but at some point, you can have too many; and should that happen, not only will your monthly bills be outrageous, you'll also get a headache from trying to navigate all of those different interfaces.

So, how many social media tools do you really need to be successful? - Achieving the basics..

First, make sure your tools have the capacity to cover your basic social media needs. It's possible to run an entire campaign with no extra tools whatsoever, but I'd argue that those main areas are lifesavers, and are borderline necessary to make a campaign successful.

Related Article: YOUR Offline Business Social Media?

Plugins and Integrations

First, set up some automatic processes. Find a plugin like Social Warfare, which will let you publish all your new posts to your social media profiles automatically, and give your online readers the chance to share your material to their own personal profiles. These functions are important because, once installed, they won't cause you any worries -- and most of them are fairly inexpensive.

Analytics

Next, you'll need a strong, reliable way to measure your campaign's impact. Most social platforms like Facebook and Twitter already offer campaign insights, even if you don't pay for advertising, but most social marketers should strive for a little more depth and specificity.

Google Analytics is a good start here, but a dedicated social media analytics platform like Sprout Social will be able to provide you with more platform-specific insights.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Success Metric?

You'll be doing a lot of posting on your social apps (at least, if you want your following to remain active and interested), and that’s a tall order for even the most dedicated social media manager. Using a publishing and scheduling app, though, will help you keep track of everything you post, and more importantly, help keep your publication consistent, even when you aren't actively on the site. Hootsuite and Buffer are two of the biggest names here, and they both offer a host of other features.

Related Article: Publishing Your Book On Social Media?

Specific Considerations

Depending on the size and nature of your business, and the goals of your campaign, you may have more niche-specific needs:

Collaboration and Management

If you have a large team, or you intend to post many times throughout the day, you'll need at least one tool that allows your team to coordinate. You should be able to delegate tasks, monitor progress and communicate with one other about the scheduling of posts, responses to customers' messages' and new developments.

Social Listening and Discovery

Part of building an active following is understanding what makes your followers tick. If you want to spend more time getting to know your customers, a social-listening and discovery app can help you do it. An app here will help you choose the right topics, jump on up-and-coming trends' and even identify influencers to leverage as part of your campaign. Social Mention and BuzzSumo are strong examples here.

Related Article: Shut Up And Listen Social Media?

Recommendations

If you're new to the social-media marketing world, or if you don't have the money to hire a professional, an app that gives you custom recommendations is essential. Such an app can help you catch typos, more easily identify trends in your analytics reports, and maybe even provide you with strategic direction. However, going with an agency or consultant will likely pay off better in the long run here.

These aren't the only niche applications you can consider, but they are some of the most common.

The Case For Minimalism

Most social media tools and apps offer multiple functions simultaneously, specializing in different areas. However, I personally advise you to enlist the help of as few tools as possible. There are several advantages to this minimalistic approach:

Cost

For starters, you'll pay far less money every month for a smaller circle of apps. With most tools charging anywhere from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars per user per month, you could save thousands of dollars a year by consolidating.

Practicality and Time

Training new people and managing your daily tasks are both much easier when you have only a few apps to worry about. Trying to keep track of dozens at once is exhausting.

Consistency

With less overlap in functionality, your employees will be able to perform their tasks more consistently, which is good if you want to learn and improve your campaign over time.

Related Article: Your Consistent Brand Presence?

Dependency

Finally, relying on lots of tools can make you lose focus of what really counts in social media -- interaction and audience-building. Keep your campaign personal, and avoid the temptation to automate everything.

So, how many social media tools do you really need? That depends on the size and nature of your campaign, but realistically, most businesses should be able to get by with one or two. As long as you have all the basics covered, you'll be in good shape; and remember: You can always add more or make a swap if you find yourself missing a key ingredient.

Focus on the fundamentals first, and build from there, as the voice and direction of your campaign matter far more to its eventual success than the tools you use to execute them.

Guest Authored By Jayson DeMers. Jayson is Founder and CEO of AudienceBloom. He "de-mystifys SEO and online marketing for business owners." Jayson graduated from the University of Washington in 2008 with a degree in Business Administration (Marketing), and immediately entered the professional online marketing world. He founded AudienceBloom in April 2010, and has since become a columnist for Forbes, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, and Huffington Post. Jayson guest lectures for marketing classes at the University of Washington, and currently resides in Seattle, WA. Follow Jayson on Twitter.

Related Article: Start-Up Stand Out Social Media?

How many social media tools do you really need?

That depends on the size and nature of your campaign, but realistically, most businesses should be able to get by with one or two.

As long as you have all the basics covered, you'll be in good shape; and remember:

You can always add more or make a swap if you find yourself missing a key ingredient.."

• 

  Post Crafted by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR "Innovative" Social Media Advertising?

The social media marketing field is crowded with businesses and personal brands trying to gain visibility; in fact, Jayson DeMer's "What Works in Online Marketing" survey found that 95 percent of marketers are planning to either increase their social media marketing budgets or keep them the same..

With that many competitors in the field, your campaign needs to be innovative if it's going to survive - but what exactly makes a campaign "innovative," and how can you achieve it?

Related Article: YOUR Offline Business Social Media?

Why Innovation Is Important?

First, let's take a look at why innovation is important.

Differentiation

You need to differentiate your brand from those of your competitors if you're going to stand out. Your prospective followers have dozens of businesses to choose from, and if your posts look the same as everyone else's, you're going to blend into the background as meaningless white noise. Doing something innovative instantly makes you stand out, and sometimes, that extra visibility is all it takes to win a follower's loyalty.

Novelty

When you do something innovative, you're also presenting your followers with something novel - something they've never seen before. This interests most people, and makes you more memorable at the same time.

Leadership

If you try something for the first time, even if you fail, you'll be seen as a leader in the industry for attempting it. People have a deep respect for pioneers and innovators, so any experiments you conduct will likely be met with interest and appreciation.

Key Qualities

At this point, I'd like to outline what I see as the three general qualities that define an innovative social media marketing campaign:

Related Article: 7 Social Media Tips For Leadership?

A Unique Voice

First, you need a unique brand voice, or at least a unique direction. Your voice should be a culmination of your values as a business, your target audience, and a juxtaposition of your business with competing businesses. Ideally, your voice will be appealing to your customers, different from those of your competitors, and representative of your brand’s personality. Sometimes, a tone is all it takes to differentiate content as belonging to one brand over another.

A Surprise

You can achieve novelty by giving your followers a surprise - and therefore triggering cognitive processes linked to memory. Surprises, by definition, deviate from the norm, making them innovative, and you can present them in a number of different ways. You might, for example, surprise your followers by giving your video a twist ending, or by shocking them with a statistic you recently found in your original research. You could also surprise them by posting something your industry does't usually like to talk about.

An Unmatched Framework

Innovation in social media is also usually marked by a defiance of traditional formatting. That may include shorter or longer posts than usual, a more or less formal way of phrasing things, or the inclusion of a content type that isn't usually posted.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Platform Persona?

Driving Innovation

So how can you inspire more innovation in your own social media campaigns? It's tough, if not impossible, to force creativity to happen, but you can use these strategies to come up with more innovative thoughts and ideas:

Remove Yourself From The Game

I frequently encourage entrepreneurs and marketers to step up their social media game by studying the actions of others, taking inspiration and learning by example. Watching how your competitors post (and how their followers respond), for example, can teach you what types of content do and don't work in your industry. However, if you want to be a true innovator, it may be better to remove yourself from the game entirely. Take a social media break, or spend more time on different platforms, watching different brands than you're used to. Get out of the routine.

Cross-Reference

You can also innovate by taking inspiration from other areas. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr are all very different social media platforms, with very different ways to post and interact, but all of them have thriving fan bases. Drawing formatting or content inspiration from one platform and hybridizing it with formatting and archetypes from another may be a useful way to come up with something novel for your fans.

Related Article: A Social Media Creativity Boost?

Break Some Rules

There are some informal "rules" for how to post and what to post on different platforms, and for the most part, they work well. However, if you want to distinguish yourself, you're going to have to be okay with breaking some of them.

Focus On An Emotion

One of the most important factors for viral content is the ability to strike an emotional chord with readers. You can stand out as a thought leader and innovator simply by evoking the right emotion, in the right way, and at the right time. You can do this, and surprise your readers at the same time, by stirring up controversy, such as by taking a strong stance or taking issue with one of your competitors.

Related Article: Making Your Social Marketing Personal?

Avoid Committee Approaches

Finally, try to avoid the "design by committee" approach to social media management. Multiple voices tend to cancel each other out and produce a vanilla, predictable finished product. Instead, designate one person to be in charge of posting, and allow their voice to stand out through the brand.

Obviously, being weird or different isn't automatically going to make your campaign a success. Doing something truly innovative is a risk, albeit one that typically pays off over the long term. In addition to your most innovative, groundbreaking content, I encourage you to create a strong foundation with more predictably successful content, including blog posts, whitepapers, and interactions with your most loyal followers.

Over time, you'll develop a reputation as a thought leader without alienating the rest of your fan base, and your social media campaign will undoubtedly benefit.

Guest Authored By Jayson DeMers. Jayson is Founder and CEO of AudienceBloom. He "de-mystifys SEO and online marketing for business owners." Jayson graduated from the University of Washington in 2008 with a degree in Business Administration (Marketing), and immediately entered the professional online marketing world. He founded AudienceBloom in April 2010, and has since become a columnist for Forbes, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, and Huffington Post. Jayson guest lectures for marketing classes at the University of Washington, and currently resides in Seattle, WA. Follow Jayson on X.

Related Article: Social Media Tools YOU Really Need?

Obviously, being weird or different isn't automatically going to make your campaign a success.

Doing something truly innovative is a risk, albeit one that typically pays off over the long term.

In addition to your most innovative, groundbreaking content, I encourage you to create a strong foundation with more predictably successful content, including blog posts, whitepapers, and interactions with your most loyal followers.."

• 
  
• 

  Post Crafted by Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)