Social Media is moving at a faster pace than ever before. Facebook now has well over 60 million business Pages, accumulating some 2.5 billion comments each month.
Amidst increasing competition, commanding your social audience’s attention has become even harder – and while larger businesses can afford to proportionally raise their investments to beat this content deluge, small businesses are often left struggling to capture any significant market share.
However, there are various tools and resources that can help, and can make a significant impact in your online marketing efforts.
Here are a five such tools to consider.
1. Advanced Marketing Institute’s headline analyzer
A recent study conducted by The French National Institute and Columbia University found that 59% of the links on Twitter have never been clicked on. The data suggests that most people share and retweet news without actually reading it.
As such, earning clicks on social media could be harder than originally thought – considering that most people have attention spans of less than 6 seconds it’s important to have article headlines that generate curiosity.
If your headline stirs emotion in your audience, you’re more likely to get that click. Test your headline’s Emotional Marketing Value with Advanced Marketing Institute’s Headline Analyzer.
2. DrumUp – Fresh curated content
Social media engagement is a quality and consistency game. If you can’t produce content that consistently engages and holds your audience, they’re likely to switch, because it’s easy for them to find alternate sources.
Creating content on a daily basis, and quality content at that, is no easy task, which is why curation can also play an important role. But curating content isn’t easy either – every 24 hours another 2 million blogs are uploaded on the internet. If you had to dig through all that to find your key content, you’d struggle to make much progress.
The alternative is to use a content curation engine like DrumUp to source fresh social media content to post on your accounts daily.
3. Quora – Content research
Phone surveys cost between $5000 and $15000 to conduct, on average, while interviews could cost around $40 per interview. Research via those means can play a significant role in your success, but conducting such research every time you have to run a social media campaign is costly, and likely not an affordable option for most small businesses.
Instead, you can use question hubs, like Quora, to assess the problems/questions that your target audience has and figure out if your product answers those questions (or if you might be able to create content that answers those questions while also helping your audience).
People love companies that solve their problems, and you’d do well to do that rather than simply marketing your products and features.
4. Piktochart – Data to infographics
Infographics are a great way to covey information – in fact, research sows that 40% of people are more responsive when information is shared in infographic form.
Creating a high-quality infographic from scratch can be time consuming, but with the advent of infographics and their growing appeal, several companies have now set out to make apps to simplify and streamline the infographic creation process.
Piktochart is one such app. You can choose from pre-designed templates and simply plug your content into it to make your infographics.
5. Google Analytics – Traffic analytics
Many businesses still continue to run their social media marketing efforts without paying any mind to analytics. Often, for small businesses, this is because they’re pressed for time, but analyzing your social efforts is critical to achieving real success.
Unless you have some idea of what content your creating is most popular, which sites are sending you the most traffic and which social media platforms are generating most referrals to your business, you can’t optimize your social media strategy. Google Analytics is easy to use and helps you find relevant insights which can play a crucial role in your strategic decision making.
There are several free apps on the internet that can make a significant difference in your social media marketing efforts. It takes time to explore them all and find what suits your business best, but doing so can definitely deliver increased efficiencies down the line and help you succeed in your social media marketing efforts. In the meantime, hopefully these five apps will help.
[Source: Socialmediatoday]
