List of 3rd Party Social Media Tools #Blab #socialmedia

Whether you are a VA looking after the Facebook and Twitter of a small business or the marketing manager who needs to social media Monitor Instagram and Risk Management, social media tools to schedule, automate, autofollow, autotweet, monitor are critical to saving time and resources. In this blab session we looked at low cost or free tools for VAs, online businesses and medium size businesses. This list is not exhaustive, just what we covered in the 1 hour chat.

Why Use Tools?

Save Time: Learn aboutautoposting and autoscheduling, natively within Facebook & Twitter as well investigate which social media dashboards are best for automation – Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Buffer. Play with automation software combined with social media dashboards to autofollow and unfollow on Twitter. Work around challenges of automating Google Plus. Includes an advanced spreadsheet conversation calendar lecture. Create bitmarks & extensions for RSS, Do Share and Recipes for If This Then That (IFTTT). IF you find the right tool it can save you time and money and staffing resources. 

Skip ahead about a minute as I was just setting up. 

When looking at Social Media tools around automation or scheduling, choose from the following

1. Automate Facebook Posts (schedule, timing) & to Twitter
2. Automate Twitter tweets (schedule, timing) & to Facebook
3. Schedule blog posts with WordPress and Facebook & Twitter.
4. Multi Platform updates – Hootsuite, Buffer, SproutSocial
5. Schedule multi platform updates
6. AutoSchedule (hootsuite, Buffer, sproutsocial).
7. Feedburner and RSS
8. Queue updates with Social Oomph (Evergreen)
9. IFTTT – examples.
10. Auto Follow Back
11. Auto Reply to new followers

What would you do, not do, think about doing?

Thanks to Tom Lahey (free Chrome Extensions course), Timm McVaigh and Antiqua Lisha for joining me on the livestreamed education session on Blab!

Monitoring & RSS readers for social media:

• NEW: Sproutsocial for monitoring (plus more).
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM1D5ZW0bhY
  Use the Feedly plugin for other people’s channels e.g Top 100 blogs for your industry.

  Instructions: feedly in sproutsocial

• Hootsuite for your own channels plus Hashtags and Lists.  Use the RSS tool for other people’s channels e.g THEIR blog. Hootsuite Syndicator
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aie1ja-N-3E
• Netvibes for other people’s channels e.g Top 100 blogs for your industry.
• Chrome Extensions from Tom Lahey

Autofollow on Social Media:

• On the Mac I use Auto Mouse Click. Use sparingly, and don’t do more than 100 (slowly) if you don’t want your account taken away for you. Useful for large companies with large followings. Not recommended with small personal brands.
• Follow: location, hashtag (eg conference) or list.
• Instagress for Instagram (we also mentioned Latergramme)
• Unfollow: spammers, old accounts, fake profiles, bought accounts.

Scheduling

• You can manually schedule (natively or via a 3 rd party app) updates to go out when you are busy
• Instagram is now added to Hootsuite which can schedule up to several hundred updates (be careful!)
• Latergram.me for Instagram
• MeetEdgar for Evergreen updates

We talked about

• Alerts from Google as a gmail or as a monitoring feed (alerts.google.com – choose RSS not email)
• TweetReach for velocity of tweets (tweetreach.com)
• CrystalKnows (reads your social media profile and then tells other people how to email you (tone, topic, style) based on your psych profile)
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Radian6) for CRM integration

We didn’t talk about (ran out of time)

• If This Then That (IFTT.com)
• Social Oomph and MeetEdgar for scheduling
• BufferApp.com which Vintuitive liked. (I use the Chrome extension).

I’m sure there were more and I’ll review the Blab video and add the others in. Soon. Soonish. :p xxx