Getting your information and ideas out to your target audience is what social media marketing is all about. But is anyone reading what you have to say? Are you neglecting one network in favor of another?
Here are 5 tools that cross post, and are free (or nearly free) to use!
1. MarketMeSuite: Social Marketing Management
2. Buffer: Social Timing
3. LiveFyre: Social Commenting
4. Constant Contact: Social Email
5. Instagram: Social Photo Sharing
1. Social Marketing
Let’s start with the first element is a cross promotional dashboard, MarketMeSuite. MarketMeSuite is an absolute juggernaut of a Marketing tool. It takes the best elements of your favorite management platforms, mixes in geo-targeting and pro-active marketing, and gives you one giant place to share,. schedule, auto-post RSS, and post in real time to Facebook at the same time as posting to Twitter and Linkedin. You can also view your newsfeeds and add comments from inside the app.
Why Is This Important? You need a centralized place to monitor all of your marketing efforts, and allow your entire team to work together. MarketMeSuite provides the “ground control” every social media campaign needs.
2. Social Timing
There is a science behind posting. Knowing where your customers are, and when is the best time to tweet is really important. You can do a lot of this manually in some of the full serviced dashboards, but what about when you’re on the net, and you see something that would be great to send out to your followers? With Buffer you can just click on the easy to install plugin and the message is queued up for times you choose when you can’t physically be there. These messages can go to Twitter and Facebook.
Why Is This Important? It’s simple, but based on some data they collected CTR on Tweets of links shared by Buffer increased by 200% after 3 weeks of regular use. (Free up to 10 tweets in your Buffer)
3. Social Commenting
If you don’t have a decent commenting plugin installed on your blog, don’t waste another second. In fact, don’t even read to the end of this post. Go right now and try LiveFyre. It’s free, and it’s taken social commenting to a new level. Users are more engaged with the story, tweeting out their comment is a breeze, and it really facilitates discussion on the blog, AND across Twitter and Facebook. In one easy click you can send a message saying “You were just mentioned in this conversation…” with a link back to the blog post. It’s amplification on steroids once it gets going.
Why Is This Important? Perpetuating a conversation gives your blog post a longer life, and if you can manage to get it into the social media sphere, you can harness that inherent virality that comes with it.
4. Old school e-mail marketing gone social
Don’t forget about old school e-mail marketing. Creating newsletters and e-mail campaigns is still as important is it was pre-social media, but now you can leverage even more from each communication. Constant Contact has a social sharing feature, so you can share your email across Twitter and Facebook in one click.
Why Is This Important? Checking your analytics is a great way to see how far a message has spread. There’s a section that tracks how “Social” your e-mail has gone, which is super helpful for measuring a campaign’s social impact.
5. Mobile Photos
Exclusive for iPhone, Instagram lets you turn your pictures into photographic masterpieces and share them across Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.
Why Is This Important? It’s great to show your fans and followers another side of you and your business. If a tweet is worth 140 characters a photo has got to be worth 10,000!
Key Take Away:
These days you absolutely have to multitask in life and in business, and your marketing message must do the same. Using this amplification tools will help you market smarter, increase click rates, reach further, and get you the most bang for your post.
Tried any of these services? Have any tips or service you would add to the list? Please leave your comments below.
Thank you.
I found buffer very useful indeed and am going to start using it now. No more spending days with emailing in the information for anything I wanted to say. Instagram works only when you are working with iphone photos right?
James, thanks for commenting. I have used Buffer in the past and like Timely, it does a nice simple job of making sure you only focus on writing. As far as I know, yes, Instagram is only for Photos and only for the iPhone.
Thanks James — let us know @marketmehelp if you have any questions at all!
whoops commented to the wrong james! commenting below!
I find that using a phone app gives me better results than desktop downloads. I can post on the go and I can be a real social networker. I like Aweber a lot however and have bad experiences with Constant Contact. What do you think of Seesmic?
Steve
Steve, thanks for the comment also! I myself use Aweber, though I also know many big companies using ConstantContact daily and happily. Seesmic is good, though it feels like they’re trying to figure out how to make money in the online world now because of their recent change in focus of business. Because of this, their application, while having many features, does not seem consistent when you go across different mediums (like from their desktop app to their web app or even their Android app).
We are on many social networks including Linkedin. We also blog on WordPress and need all the time we can get to post to all our post points at the same time. Thank you for the suggestions; we will be checking them out more. We do not post photographs a lot, so we can just go with even an email option.
Brian, thanks for the reply. You can email in your statuses to many social networks by the way, and if you’re on the computer more than often, sometimes posting directly using the tools Tammy listed above can be faster than emailing in your posts to all the social networks. ConstantContact is basically an email newsletter management service, and thus, if you want an email list, that is the way to go.
Thanks for this insight into MMS. I have been using it for about 2 mohnts. Still struggling with a few minor issues that I have not taken the time to learn but really love the overall program. Glad to know the story behind the story!
Thanks James! Let us know if we can help you at all @marketmehelp!
I have been trying to find alternatives to tweetdeck for sometime now since they got bought, thanks for posting this list.
Glad you’ll be giving MarketMeSuite a try!
SocialImprove, thanks for posting this
-Tammy, CEO @MarketMeSuite
I also notice that TweetDeck definitely slowed down in terms of updates and new features once they got bought. Try from the list above, and if you’ve any questions about MarketMeSuite, let Tammy know!
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