What’s the trick with social media distribution?
Social media marketing is the talk of these days. Some say it’s more important than content marketing, while others claim it is only through great content that popularity and site visibility can be achieved.
It’s true that, without website content, it is practically impossible to get and engage site visitors. It is impossible to make a choice between writing great copy and sharing it. Developing a rock-solid content strategy is based both on what you write and on which social channels you end up choosing.
10 tools to apply effortless social media distribution
We’ll begin the list with a disclaimer. It’s up to a business person (handling their own content marketing) or a balanced digital marketer to realize which distribution networks one must focus on.
Owning and managing accounts on all channels nowadays could be disastrous, because sharing content on all of them takes time. We, for instance, develop content marketing for startups and other small-sized businesses, which are mostly in the tech field. It would be useless for us to use Facebook, given the fact that entrepreneurs spend only a limited time on this platform, when compared to LinkedIn or Xing. In other words, choose your distribution wisely and stick to it, as long as it fits your needs.
1. Hubspot
Yes, yes, switching from WordPress or any other CMS to Hubspot is both tedious (and requires the assistance of a developer) and costly, but the advantages are quite a few. With Hubspot, one can integrate social media efforts into writing content and it saves A LOT of time. From our experience, we can say Hubspot has helped us with managing the social accounts of many of our clients. In the past, we used more tools to integrate what we wrote on those accounts, but now there’s only one thing we truly need, and it’s all right here, where we write our own content. We can post on Twitter, Google+, Facebook (some of our customers speak to this type of audience exactly), Pinterest and any other network we need, from the same place. On top of this, using Hubspot, we measure the social reach of our posts.
2. HootSuite
Hootsuite is, in fact, what we used when our website was hosted on WordPress. The main advantage to choosing this platform is you can post on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other networks, and schedule your messages in advance. We now no longer need its assistance, seeing that posting on all the above mentioned channels is possible from Hubspot.
3. Buffer
Buffer does the exact same thing as Hootsuite and Hubspot Social Inbox, but it also shortens users’ links, so they don’t need to use other apps, such as bit.ly. Buffer will take care of posting for you all throughout the day, on all social accounts you’ve connected to the app. Scheduling statuses is also possible for various dates in the future.
4. TweetDeck
I myself was a TweetDeck aficionado for more than a year, in the past. I believe the main pro to using this Twitter-produced app is you can see in real-time who engages with you. New comments and tweets come up in the flow, and if a user activates sound notifications or uses two computer screens (as I personally enjoy doing), he can keep track of some news.
5. MailChimp
We love MailChimp so much that we wrote an entire article about its marketing strategy. Marketers nowadays have the tendency to avoid email marketing, because most of them are scared their messages will be interpreted as spam. The irony of this potentially fatal omission is that lead generation and conversion optimization take place a lot faster and with more satisfactory results, in this case. Users read and stay engaged thanks to weekly or monthly email, and MailChimp does exactly that, by letting users create their customized newsletters and analyze their performance.
6. Friends+Me
Friends+me is a social media distribution tool primarily focused on Google+, given the fact that Google usually indexes all of the content on this particular network and displays it in search results. Friends+me integrates with others channels, such as: Facebook (pages, groups and personal profiles), Twitter (personal profiles), LinkedIn (company pages, groups and profiles) and Tumblr blogs. Just as the beginning of this article stated, the Friends+me homepage claims that everything starts with focusing on creating great content to share, the best thing you can do to increase your (brand) visibility on the Internet.
7. SpredFast
As is the case of HootSuite and other tools we have already presented above, SpredFast is a social media strategy platform used for engaging with followers and distributing content. The option also allows users to track their marketing efforts, with the help of insightful analytics. An attractive feature of SpredFast is it allows users to target specific audiences, which evidently matters when it comes to sales.
8. Swayy
Swayy integrates with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but I am sure it will gradually add more networks to handle in the future. For the moment, a regular user can share interesting pages that show up in the Swayy flow based on every individual’s preference. I myself logged in using my personal Facebook account, and the content visible above is what showed up when the tool automatically analyzed the content of my profile (what I shared and posted).
9. Bit.ly
I guess everyone’s heard about Bit.ly at least once, regardless of being regular Twitter users or not. Its popularity can be explained easily: it shortens links so people can use them on social networks. Tweets can still be no longer than 140 characters, and Facebook has a funny thing for links from websites that seem spammy. If you’re having a hard time writing a Twitter status because of the ample title of your blog post, use this tool. The paid version creates detailed analytics of all links you’ve created using the tool, whereas the free version analyzes the links you’ve created during the last 7 days. Bit.ly tool also available for iOS mobile devices.
10. Socialoomph
Through Socialoomph, it’s possible to schedule social media posts for the entire day, so nothing seems different from other platforms. But wait, there’s more! Socialoomph can also be used for keyword research, URL shortening and purging Tweets. For now, up to five Twitter accounts can be used when scheduling posts, without any charge whatsoever.
Other articles in the series:
Part 1. SEO tools. Market analysis and keyword research.
Part 2. Tools for research and idea generation.
Part 3. Tools for copywriting.
