If you follow our blog you’ll know we like to post some helpful tips on various aspects of social media now and again. Expect more of the same here where we’ll be offering a run through of tools and applications to act as a guide to help you manage your social media marketing.

Some of the tools mentioned are ones that we use day to day. Find the approach and tools that works best for you and your team.

Our Blog

Our blog doubles as our site and is built on WordPress.com – arguably the best and most cost effective content management system for a website. Very user friendly. A Blog can be integrated with your website, it can be your website (like ours) or it can stand apart with links to the site.

A regular blog with good content is search engine feeder – Google or Bing. They love new content. One of the nice little features of WordPress is scheduling posts. We wrote this one at the end of May. It helps to space out and keep a regular flow of content and means you aren’t scrambling to write something every few days.

One of the most popular blogs today is by Copyblogger and that started out with 2 – 3 regular pieces of good content per week.

Managing Social Networks

• Hootsuite – a social media dashboard for managing Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, blogs. Very user friendly and easy to pick up.
• Tweetdeck (version 0.38.1) – we use this to supplement the Hootsuite management dashboard. Slightly less user friendly. Also this version of Tweetdeck works best. Try and find it online or contact us for the file. The most recent version of  Tweetdeck is terrible. A poor reflection of its former self.
• Social Oomph – not as user friendly as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck but still an effective tool to manage your social networks. Social Oomph is primarily there as a backup should Hootsuite and Tweetdeck go down.

Apps

• Buffer – for timing posts to Twitter and Facebook.
• Timly – analyses your feed and times posts when most people will see them within your fans/followers.
• Bitly – a link shortening tool that’s great for tracking link clicks.
• Social Mention - is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content across (you guessed it) social media. We search for trending topics, what our customers might search for, blogs, statistics and other forms of media we can share.

Developing Content

• Google Reader – a web based reader used for pulling in content from Atom and RSS feeds. We use it to find the content that’s relevant to our industry and also for subscribing to numerous Blogs. It pulls in all of these blog feeds in one handy place to review later, tweet about, Blog about etc.
• StumbleUpon – A social bookmarking site that finds and recommends web content to its users. We use it for finding content related to social media. Again this is used to pull in information but we use this less than Google Reader.

Implementation

All of these tools are not only very useful they are also completely free. There may be a cost to set these things up like the Blog for example but the spend won’t be that much at all.  It doesnt take long to set them up either.

If you don’t use these already we’d really recommend using these tools in helping you manage your company’s social media marketing.

Do you use any apps or tools that we haven’t listed? Do you like or dislike any tools listed? Please leave us some comments and let us know.

Darren