If you have a blog then you probably already know how important social media is for driving traffic. If you blog for your business, then it’s a great way to effectively connect with your audience. That is, if you’re managing your social media effectively, measuring its results and tweaking your campaigns accordingly. But that can be time consuming and even confusing. It takes time to find good content or create good content to share, to check statuses and messages across multiple social media sites.
Fortunately, there are many programs and tools available to help you do just that. Unfortunately, though, there are so many it can be hard to decide which ones are the best ones to use in your situation. Here are a few lesser-known tools you likely haven’t heard of before...
Cyfe
Whether you need to track followers, likes, mentions and other things across a slew of social accounts or you simply want to monitor how visitors interact with your site, track conversions and key performance indicators or how many visitors download something – Cyfe can help you do it all. You can easily select what you want to track and create a custom dashboard that shows you all the important stuff at a single glance. You can even have the dashboard and data conveniently emailed to you at scheduled intervals.
The number of widgets you can incorporate with Cyfe is pretty amazing. Just a few of the many include Gmail, Basecamp, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook Ads, FreshBooks, Aweber, Instagram, Google Adwords and Unbounce.
Many big brands take advantage of Cyfe’s features, including Whole Foods, Care.com and Marriot. That might make you think it has to be crazy expensive, but surprisingly they have plans that start at just $19 per month.
Rival IQ
Another interesting tool I just recently came across is Rival IQ. This one makes it super simple to see how you measure up against your competitors. You can look at their activity on different social platforms, engagement and audience growth. You can compare it to yours and even use it to see what’s working and create better social media content to use for yourself. You can see what kind of content users tend to share more and when activity peaks. It’s a bit more expensive, though. It starts at $99 per month, but you can test the waters with a two week free trial.
Hashcore
If you use Twitter then you need to know about Hashcore. What does it do? It creates in-content, interactive links for hashtags. Readers can click the hashtag, which opens a new window. Here they can see other tweets that have that hashtag, follow you or join the conversation by creating their own tweet. They can do all this without ever leaving your site to go see what the all the ‘hash’ is about. It’s an innovate way to add interaction to your site, keep visitors on your blog longer and get more tweets and followers. Simply install their script onto your server or host and you'll be up and running in no time. If you use WordPress, it’s even easier with their plugin.
Folwd
This is for you if you simply don’t have the time to constantly be looking for great content to share. Folwd gives you a completely hands-off approach to keeping your social media streams full of content that followers will love (once you set it up, anyways). Setting it up is easy as pie. Just select the categories and tags you want to find content for, connect your social accounts and tell it which content you want to published to each account. It can find and publish automatically for you or you can choose to approve each social media post before it goes live.
