Better than the ultimate list of social media tools: RazorSocial new directory

Great list of concrete tips... which all starts with content. And if you're struggling with #3 on how to leverage SlideShare, here's how we did it.

The part on LinkedIn group is more of a puzzle for me: I participate in several but haven't really found a lot of value. Or maybe I just can't measure it for now? 

Facebook advertising is not so much un chartered territory anymore. Whether you've experimented with advertising on the biggest social network or not, these are interesting data points that will inspire your next campaign. 

The underlying trend here is that it's getting harder and harder to develop a business' visibility on Facebook without paying. Organic reach has kept declining as Facebook made it clear that the model was prioritizing organic visibility of individuals vs pages. It doesn't mean paying for views and engagement on Facebook is stupid though: with proper optimization - the main one being to adopt a content hub strategy for your social content - you can amplify the visibility you'll buy through ads. 

Even if the #1 is kind of obvious, a good checklist to use when publishing to Facebook.

#5 and #6 are surprising to me though... I'd recommend doing some tests as this might vary a lot depending on your target audience. 

Did you find publishing after hours and on weekends to be effective?

Great resource by Pam Dyer and yes headlines are important - particularly for content curators who should think about giving new headlines to the content they curate to contextualize it to their audience. 

This context can and should be added through added insights but very often, content curation (and good content sharing in general) is indeed more about making readers understand what's in it for them than anything else. 

If you feel overwhelmed by the constant influx of new tools to optimize social media, rejoice: IanCleary's RazorSocial just launched in beta a great directory of social media tools. 

So rather than relying on "ultimate", "definitive" or "very best" lists of such tools that the Internet will never cease to produce, you can rely on Ian's laser sharp eye (and his great community) to spot all the new trends and fancy tools. 

Check out Scoop.it entry on it and share the love by tweeting it! 

Although these ideas are far from new, they're still three important tips for anyone getting started (or not getting started) on social media.

I'm a firm advocate of #2 - reusing and resharing content. For SMBs who don't have time or resources to create an entire suite of content that will fill up social media channels for days, weeks, or even months, resharing the same content in different contexts is the way to go.

Each morning, I fill up my Scoop.it Smart Scheduler with the top content from our blog over the last month, as these are the pieces that clearly resonated with our audience and could potentially be useful to some new eyes if shared again. It's the best way to ensure that our brand's social media channels are full and also that our content is given a new life every so often.

Ian Cleary from RazorSocial outlines a few simple steps to audit your social media marketing in a few simple questions and assess whether it's time to change something or not. 

The most important question is probably #2: are you attracting an audience that converts? 

I remember we had this debate with @Ally Greer in the early days of our community management: we realized that posting pictures of cats or inspiring quotes from famous people would get us a lot of likes on Facebook. But what good did it bring to us as a business? Not much... 

Now a lot of businesses don't even stand a chance at converting social media traffic because they're mostly just sharing links and not directing traffic to their own websites. While they direct traffic to their websites when they share their own blog posts, they fail to do so with the content they curate. The first step to consider to convert social media traffic is to create a hub for your social media content and your created content: your blog is probably the perfect candidate for that (if you're wondering how to do that, check our guide to adding curated content to your blog).

We've all seen rankings like these but Twtrland had an interesting approach: they ranked influencers based on how many conversations they had on social media. Forget the broadcasters who play hard-to-get and never reply: these are the nice guys you can talk to. 

The decline of organic reach on Facebook is continuing as I observed last year calling social media publishing dead (as we knew it). In this post, @Janet Fouts describes how it's going to be even worse in 2015.

As I explained back then, the solution resides on using social networks not as your real estate but as distribution channels for content placed in a hub you control. As CMI's Joe Pulizzi also puts it: "don't build your content marketing on rented land". Even if social media is your most important activity (as a community manager for instance), if you're just sharing links, you're missing out: you should use a content hub. This can be a blog, a mini content site (such as a Scoop.it page) or something else but this needs to be a pace where you can convert your readers to either subscribe, learn about your product or engage with you directly. 

Feeling lost when trying to keep your social media profiles up to date? There are some great tips in this list!