Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The sheer amount of “essential” social media tools out there is astounding. The lists of social media tools you can’t live without have expanded from 10 to 30 to the hundreds, making my eyes glaze over. How do you know which tools are truly great and which ones are superfluous? I’ve cultivated a few questions I find myself asking over and over when looking into social media tools, and which ones answer the call with gusto.

I’ll often run across an incredibly cool social media strategy or format or tool or link and think to myself, “Whoa, how’d they do that?”

There are things like shortened custom URLs, evergreen queues, personalized recommendations, and more. And I’m so inspired by the cleverness and resourcefulness—not to mention the great value and utility—of these methods.

So I’ve gone about trying to figure them all out.

Check out my DIY tips below for putting together each of these strategies.

Because they’ve become so essential, there are actually quite a few social media management tools on the market. Some are well known, and some aren’t.

But what’s interesting is the fact that some of the lesser known tools are starting to catch up (or have already caught up) with their more popular competitors. In fact, some of these tools offer completely unique functionalities which may really benefit your Social Media game.

With this is mind, here’s my list of the five best social media tools to try in 2015....

We’ve been excited to experiment with the process of building slide decks around the Buffer content we have here on the blog, and in the course of doing so, we discovered a trove of wonderfully succinct and visual slide decks all about our favorite topic: social media.

We’ve collected a great group of 25 here—the first handful from our top Buffer posts and another handful from the amazing selection on SlideShare. I’d love to hear if you have a favorite!...

Big or small, influencer or newcomer, everyone looking to get more followers and more likes on social media—more engagement, period—seeks out strategies that work.

And what works with a platform of 11 million followers tends to work for platforms with 100, too.

Social media is a moving ocean of posts, images, tools, ideas, and content that flows at a fast pace. You can find success by building your own social media strategy and keeping it fluid by checking and rechecking what’s working.

I’ve had the chance to check and recheck dozens of different social media strategies in managing a social media platform of 11 million. How do I do everything that I do? And what do I do, specifically? Well, I’d love to share the details with you!...

So Buzzstream and Fractl got together to survey close to 900 people to understand why they unfollow brands on social media.

Let’s consider the data together. Are you ready?

Who unfollowed me on Facebook: THE STATS

-  25% said they unfollowed at least one brand in the last month

-  20% said they unfollow if posts are too repetitive or boring

-  19% said they unfollow if brands post more than 6 times per day

-  7% unfollow after finding a competitor’s page

-  20% went as far as to hide posts from the pages they unfollowed...

Social media strategy is the deployment and development of modern strategic plans for social media. A Social media strategy incorporates these new ways of communication where media is not only broadcast but also shared, commented, opined edited or modified by the public at large.

A winning social media strategy is all about working smarter, not harder. Unless you are an enterprise level company, all you need to truly rock your social media is 30 minutes a day. With automation tools like Pardot to take care of many of the time-consuming and repetitive tasks, all that you need is a well defined daily plan and some self discipline....

If you’re an avid social media user, it’s always smart to have a backup of your data. Archiving your data is great in cases where a site shuts down, or your account is compromised or you want to close down your accounts. Having an ongoing archive however will fast become a really good idea, especially when something bad happens to your online accounts, and you can’t be sure if you can still retrieve the data that belongs to you.

Various tools help you backup your data from various several sites all at once, like SocialSafe and Backupify but if you’re only looking to archive only a site or two, then these may not be the best options for you. Plus, they don’t let you backup your data to your Cloud storage be it Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Evernote or Box.

But there is an alternative: IFTTT recipes....

With Canva, creating social graphics is a snap, with templates already sized to fit Facebook covers and posts, Twitter headers and posts, Instagram posts, Pinterest pins, Google+ covers, Tumblr banners and graphics, and YouTube channel art.

Above all – your first concern should be that your visual content is being seen how you intend it to — that the dimensions are right, so nothing gets cut off or stretched out of proportion.

But don’t strain your brain trying to remember how many pixels go where or scour each site’s help section for the information — instead, bookmark this page and use the infographic below as a cheat sheet for creating all your social media images....

As the co-founder of the Social Tools Summit, the first social media conference devoted entirely to social media tools, how they can benefit your social media program, and best practices in utilizing them, it is my job to audit the entire social media for business universe and create sessions based on the types of social media tools that are becoming mainstream in the corporate world.

This is the background to the 10 sessions revolving around social media tools that were just announced for the upcoming Social Tools Summit taking place in San Francisco, CA on October 27 and 28, 2015....