Module 4. Session 2: 10 Tools To Maximize

Transcription

1 Twitter Module 4 Session 2: 10 Tools To Maximize Your Effectiveness On Twitter

2 Table of Contents 10 Tools 1 1. SocialOomph 1 2. Tweriod 2 3. Buffer 2 4. HootSuite 3 5. Sprout Social 4 6. Followerwonk 5 7. Trendsmap 5 8. Storify Klout 6

3 Welcome to session 2: 10 tools to maximize your effectiveness on Twitter. This has always been a popular topic every time I have been teaching, or speaking and one of the common questions that I am asked is, what third-party management tools I should be using. What you will find as you start to ramp up your Twitter marketing is that Twitter is labor intensive. It takes time to go in there to publish your updates. It takes time to engage with people. It takes time to track and record the number of updates that you are doing and at what times they are getting the best response and the most amount of engagement. Using cost effective third-party tools to help you manage this Twitter marketing program is a really great idea. What we are going to focus on for the remainder of this session, is getting the right tools for you and the right resources in place to help you maximize your efforts. 10 Tools 1. SocialOomph Now, the first tool that I want to talk about is called SocialOomph. It is available at socialoomph. com and it is a free tool with paid options. Now, this used to be a really popular tool that I would recommend to people for one particular function and feature. You used to be able to set the tool up, so that it would auto follow back any new followers that you got. That being said, Twitter has recently updated their terms of service and that is now no longer an option. It is not approved by Twitter to be able to auto follow people back. That kind of eliminated that one feature from SocialOomph, but one of the other features of SocialOomph is that it has got an improved direct mail inbox function, or management options. You can basically purge your entire direct message box through this tool, which is helpful because you will find that you are going to get a lot of spam in your direct message box after a while, if you don t stay on top of it. Another real neat feature of this one is that they will Digest, so basically anybody that has replied to a message of yours, it will you a digest and that can be very helpful staying on top of the people that are trying to communicate with you. As well, they have a whole bunch of other options and features available inside of this tool. You can schedule updates to go out to multiple different networks. You can send out direct messages to people. You can send out automatic direct messages, which I don t recommend doing, but there are a lot of functions and a lot of features inside this tool. Now, a lot of different social media experts, or people that have large platforms, they really rely on this tool. I personally don t really like SocialOomph. I find that it is a little bit clunky. It is a little bit hard to navigate, but there are some great features to it, so it may be something that you might want to go and check out. 1

4 2. Tweriod The next tool that I want to recommend that you check out is called Tweriod. Now, it is available at tweriod.com and again, it is a free tool with paid options. Tweriod is kind of cool because what it does is it actually analyzes all of your tweets and all of your followers tweets. What it will do is, it will create a report for you and tell you the best time to tweet, so that you can get the most reach, so that your message gets in front of the most eye balls as possible. When it comes to being efficient and effective, being able to make sure that you are only putting out, or publishing updates when the most people will see them as possible is super effective. It is definitely something to take a look at. The free reports that you can run on a site, will analyze up to 1,000 followers. If you want to analyze more than that, then you will have to pay for an account. But, the tip here with this one is, really, that you want to time your updates, so that they have the most exposure possible to your followers. Tweriod is a really great tool to make sure that you are doing that, so check it out at tweriod.com. 3. Buffer Then next tool that I am going to recommend is Buffer. It is available at bufferapp.com and again, it is a free tool with paid options. Buffer is a really, really cool tool. This is one of the ones that we use quite often. What this tool allows you to do is set a posting schedule in advance and then, you can add updates to it and it will automatically shoot out your updates at those scheduled times. It works almost like a hopper, where you set it up and say, here is the four times throughout the day that I want my updates to go out. With a free account, I think you can Buffer up to 10 updates. Their paid account, the next step up, is only $10 a month and you can fill that Buffer as full as you can get it. It is a really, really awesome tool and for $10 a month, I totally suggest that you go ahead and sign up and upgrade the account. I think it is called The Awesome Package, or something like that and it truly is awesome. One of the cool things about Buffer too, is that it is not only designed for Twitter, but it will also connect to your Google+ page, if you have it, to your LinkedIn, to your Facebook profile, your Facebook pages. You can update all of your different networks at totally different times and all you need to do is just continually fill that Buffer. It has a really cool app too that you can install. I know it is available in Chrome. It may be available in Firefox as well. But, inside of Chrome, it will put a button in your browser, so if you are reading a blog article and you think it is a really good one and you want to share that with your audience, you can click that button, it will open up a little Buffer pop up window. It will pre-populate the message box with the title of the article and a link to it and you can modify that if you want and then, you can either post it immediately, or you can click on add to buffer and it will just put it in into your hopper. Basically, when those certain times come every day, where it needs to publish an update, it takes the first one that was put into that hopper and shoots it out to your network. 2

5 You can actually fill this up days and days in advance and still be able to share fairly relevant and current information with people. Scheduling your tweets in advance with a tool like Buffer is a great way to make the most efficient use of your time. Especially if you have limited staff, this is a really great tool for that. On top of the extension for your browser that I mentioned, it also integrates with numerous apps, so various apps on your phone, if maybe you have an RSS reader on your smart phone, where you can get blogs subscriptions and articles just come directly into that app. You can click on a button and Buffer those articles as you see them come in, so it is really great that way. They also have a really good analytics too, that will show you the reach and the amount of interactions that you received from each one of your updates, so that again, is a really, really powerful tool. I highly recommend Bufferapp. It is a really great application. 4. HootSuite The next tool that I recommend and one that I have been a fan of and a user of for a very long time, it s called HootSuite. It is located at hootsuite.com. Again, it is a free tool with some paid options, or upgraded packages. HootSuite is amazing. This is the go-to standard. We use this for all of our clients. We use this in-house for our own accounts. It is a great, great tool. It will allow you to, like Buffer, publish to multiple accounts all at once, which is very cool. It also works in place of Twitter, so that you have streams. Where you would have your timeline for Twitter, where all the updates from all of the people that you are following show up, you have that setup in a column and you can kind of see that in a screen shot here. But, you can also have all of the mentions too show up in another column and all your direct messages show up in another. You can save searches. Maybe you save a search for any tweet that mentions a particular keyword. You can have that show up in another column. With the scheduling and the publishing feature, you can have all of your messages that are going to be sent out that are in queue right now, show up in another column, so it is very, very effective that way. I have a very high regard for this tool. I think it is just amazing. On top of all of those features as well, they also have very extensive analytics, the same as Bufferapp, probably more in-depth. They also have the ability to create and run reports. If you are working within a marketing team and you report to a management person, you can actually run a report and brand that report and use that as part of your reporting to your superiors, so that s a really great tool. One of the features that I really, really like about HootSuite is they have the ability to publish updates through RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically, what it is, the way that it works, is it is like a signal. If you are following a blog and you subscribe to their RSS feed, when they publish a new blog post, it will automatically send out a signal. Well, through 3

6 HootSuite, you can capture that signal and it will publish that blog post to any of your different channels every time it checks to see if there are any new updates. So, you can subscribe to your own blog and when you publish a blog post, it will automatically shoot out a link to all the different channels that you have set up. You can use this feature with your own blog. You can use it with other people s blogs, maybe there is an industry blog, or something like that, or industry news site, so it is a really cool feature. On top of that feature, HootSuite now has built an apps directory, so you can plug in all these different kinds of apps into your HootSuite as well. It works with Evernote. It works with Gmail. It works with Foursquare, Google+, Instagram and YouTube. It works with a lot of different applications and a lot of different networks, so it is a really cool tool. I highly recommend you go and check it out. This is the tool that we use for all of our Twitter monitoring and all of our Twitter publishing. We don t ever go to twitter.com, or very rarely. It is all done within this tool. It is a very, very great tool, so definitely check it out. 5. Sprout Social The next tool here is called Sprout Social. It is available at sproutsocial.com. They offer a free trial, so a little different than a free account. You can use their tool for free for a set amount of time and then, you are expected to get a paid account. I believe it is 30 days and the cost on it is roughly between $40 and $100 a month. You can take a test drive of the platform, see if it is a good fit for you and your team and see if it is going to help you reach your social media marketing goals. Some really cool features of this one this tool is a lot like HootSuite. I don t find it quite as easy to use as HootSuite, but it is still vey user friendly, that being said, so yes, a really great tool. It has got really good engagement metrics and it also tracks your response times, so it will measure the efficiency of your team. If you have numerous people doing social media and you are doing it through this tool, you can see what kind of response times you have if there is an enquiry, or a request for more information, or support request, that sort of thing. You can also publish scheduled updates that will go out to multiple social networks, so similar to that of HootSuite and Buffer. Another kind of cool feature of Sprout Social is that they have this viral post technology. It is kind of like Tweriod, that we talked about, about finding the optimized time to send out your updates. That is kind of what their viral post technology will do. That is a really cool and unique feature. They also offer brand and keyword monitoring, so any mentions of your brand, or particular keywords, you will be notified about that. Again, it is a really good tool. I have used it in the past. I enjoyed it, so definitely worth checking out. 4

7 6. Followerwonk The next tool is called Followerwonk. It is available at followerwonk.com. It is a free tool, also with paid options. Now this tool is used to gather data and it will help you to enhance your campaigns and it will help you to determine whether or not your strategy that you are using in effective. One of the things that this tool do, is it will compare the followers of your competitors to your own and help you to identify overlaps. It also helps you to identify potential new audiences, people that are following your competitors that aren t following you, so that is a cool feature. It will also help you to find and connect with new influencers in your niche. It has got some tracking and reporting ability that kind of measures people s influence, so that is also another really cool feature. Another feature that I really like about this is that it will help you to determine which types of tweets cause your followers to unfollow you. We talked about that in a previous module about the different reasons that people can unfollow you. This one will actually analyze your tweets and show you that these particular types of tweets are causing people to unfollow you, so they maybe topics that you need to avoid with your audience. It will also help you to determine which tweets have resulted in new followers, so that gives you an indicator of the kinds of information that should be sharing more of to help you build your account. It is a very in-depth and very powerful analytics program. I highly recommend you go check this one out 7. Trendsmap The next tool that I want to talk about is called Trendsmap. It is located at trendsmap.com. This one is also a free tool with paid options. This one is a fairly new discovery for me. I was really fascinated by it. It is like no other tool that I have seen before. Basically, what it does is it maps out the different trends that are happening on Twitter. It will show you what s trending nationally, or what s trending in your province, or your state, or you can even go very in-depth with it and see what s trending in your city, or even in a particular neighborhood, if there is a keyword trending in your neighborhood. It is really, really cool that way that it shows you what the locals are talking about. What are people talking about right now and it is all done in real-time and it is all overlaid over the top of this map, so it is a really unique tool that way. It allows you to be able to find trends that may be related to your brand that you can maybe pipe in on and join a conversation that way. It also gives you the ability to find out about emerging local news, so you can stay on top of what s latest and breaking right in your own neighborhood, or right in your own city, which is also very cool. You can also tweet directly right from the web application as well. It is definitely worth checking out. A really interesting tool, like I said, like nothing I have ever seen before. I think that being able to stay on top of local trends and that sort of thing is very powerful, especially for a brick and mortar business. 5

8 8. Storify The next tool that has become fairly popular is called Storify. It is available at Storify.com and again, a free tool with paid options. What this tool allows you to do is to stay on top of trending topics and it helps you to participate in these widespread conversations. You do that by telling stories, by collecting updates from social networks. As an example, maybe you have an event you have put on and you can actually go and collect media and collect snippets and samples and embed these on a Storify stream. People who are at your conference that are talking about it and commenting on how great it is, how much value they got, maybe there are people who have posted YouTube video and that sort of thing, you can collect all of these different pieces of media and put them together to create a story through a stream, which is really, really unique. Then, you can, obviously, drive people to the story and share that with them. It allows you to drag and drop status updates, photos, videos, to illustrate the story that you are trying to create and you can also add in your own narrative using headers, hyperlinks and style text and that sort of thing. Then, you can easily notify all the people that you quoted in your story as well, so that also helps prop up those other people, it helps you to get recognized by those people and build better relationships. So, definitely check out Storify. It is a very creative tool and a very creative spin on social media and a different way to publish information. Definitely check out Storify. I think it is a really unique tool and it has got a lot of possibilities. 10. Klout Now, the last tool that I want to recommend that you go and check out is called klout. It is available at klout.com and it is a free tool. What Klout does is it measures your influence based on your ability to drive action on your social networks. You can connect it to your Twitter, connect it to your Facebook and there are a whole bunch of other social networks that it will connect to. It basically analyzes all of your activity and gives you a scoring on a scale of 1 to 100 that lets you know how much influence you have in your network. It also will identify other people that have influence that you are connected to and it shows you which topics they are influential about, based on all this analysis that it does. If you are looking to reach out to a thought leader, or build a circle of influence, you can find specific people that have klout, or that have influence with their network on particular topics. This is great as a research tool to be able to figure out who you are going to reach out to and who to possible alliance with, or partnership with, or developing a relationship with, would make a lot of sense. Another great use for this tool is it allows you to research your competitors and find out what are they influential about, who is influencing them, who are they connected to that has influence. This is a powerful tool once you start to really dive into it and start using it. They have 6

9 also introduced this other really neat feature called Klout Perks. There are companies that will pay Klout to promote them to their audience. Now, most people are thinking, oh great, I am going to get sold to, or advertised to, this is different. The way that Klout does it is, if you have a certain level of klout, your Klout number is at a certain point, you get these free perks through these different companies. As an example, a Perk that I am waiting on that s coming here in the next couple of days is Chevy has released their brand new 2014 Chevy Silverado and because of my level of klout, I get a free three day test drive of this new Chevy Silverado. They are going to drop it off at my house. It doesn t cost me any money. It has got a full tank of gas. When they come and pick it up, I don t even have to fill it up. They just want me to test drive this brand new Chevy Silverado and then, obviously they have got a hashtag created and they want me to share my thoughts of test driving this brand new truck. That is a really cool Perk and I really look forward to it and I am definitely going to use the hashtag and share my thoughts. That is what they want. They are really trying to find different influencers out there and get them to talk about their products. It is kind of a new age advertising, if you will, this social proof and tapping into the social world. Those are called Klout Perks. There are all different kinds of Perks in there, so definitely check that out. Now, one of the other tools that I mentioned to you a bit ago was HootSuite. Another reason why I really like HootSuite is HootSuite is connected to Klout. When you are looking at a user s profile that sent out a tweet, it will show you their Klout number, right inside of Hoot- Suite and you can actually filter a stream, so that anybody below a certain Klout score won t show up. You can filter your streams to see the most influential people who you are following and what they are talking about. Klout is really cool and because it is connected to HootSuite makes it that much better. Definitely check out klout.com, create a free account, start cashing in on your new levels of influence and get some of these really cool Perks. That brings us to the end of session 2. In session 3, we are going to be talking about social media tools best practices, so we will see you in session 3. 7