7 Tools to Dramatically Improve Your Social Media Productivity

There are so many social media channels and it’s very difficult to keep up.

As soon as you feel you are making progress, the new shiny social network emerges that you ‘must be on’.

This is challenging and difficult for Marketers and we all struggle with it.

You need to have a good social media strategy in place but once you have this you can support it with good tools.

In this article we outline 7 tools that will help dramatically improve your social media productivity and help support your strategy.

1. Use Postplanner for Facebook

Postplanner is a Facebook page management application you install within Facebook. It has all the normal page management features, such as scheduling, but it also has a secret sauce.

The secret sauce is a content discovery engine. Finding the best content to share takes time and using Postplanners content discovery engine you will save a ton of time.

It finds you content in the following ways:

Status updates – There is a database of thousands of status updates you can pick from and share with your audience. These are updates that get attention and interaction. Select an update, click a button and it’s in the schedule.
Blog content – Postplanner will crawl the internet and find articles relevant to your industry and then it allows you to sort these so, for example, you can view articles that were shared the most. The best way of getting interaction on content is finding content that is popular already.
Facebook/Twitter accounts – Add your favorite Facebook pages you follow or Twitter accounts and pick off the best content. For example, if know of some Facebook pages that share great content that is relevant to your target audience, add these on to Postplanner. You can then easily pick off their most engaging content and share it to your audience.

2. Capture Relevant Information Using Evernote

As someone that produces content on a regular basis you are always on the look out for good content, quotes, images, ideas for posts.

To save time you need to have a way of capturing organizing this in an efficient way.

Evernote is really nice way of organizing this content in one place.

Find content on the web and copy it with a click of a button. Jot down an idea on your mobile device using Evernote and automatically sync it to your desktop. Capture an image that you want to reference in a future post.

Set up Evernote folders in an organized way to store your content and you’ll save a lot of time.

3. Use Edit Flow For planning out your blog calendar

Writing regular content through your blog requires some advanced planning to become efficient.

One area that will help with efficiency is an editorial calendar. There are many editorial calendars available that can help. One that is free for WordPress is Editflow.

Here are some of the great features

Create custom statuses – You can create a workflow for your posts. For example, an idea could be at ‘pitch’ status. When someone starts work on it, it could be ‘In progress’ and when it’s ready for review it could be ‘In review’ phase.
Calendar – You can view all your posts in a calendar with proposed dates. This lets you see how much content you have planned. By looking at the dates/times you immediately
Team Workflow – You can set up a workflow where team members get notified when posts change status. For example, if a post is ready for review another member of your team could be automatically notified.

Building a better process will help save you time blogging. Editflow and similar editorial calendar management tools can help.

4. Google Keyword Planner for ensuring you are writing what people want

You can write any content for your existing audience but one way of attracting a new audience is paying attention to what your potential audience is searching.

Google keyword planner is a free tool provided by Google that shows you an estimate of the amount of searches for particular words.

When you do a search based on keywords it will show you similar keywords and these can be a great source of ideas for articles.

5. Target relevant people on Twitter using Twtrland

Twitter can be a great tool for building relationships with your target audience but you need to ensure you are targeting the right people.

One very useful tool for finding this audience is Twtrland.

Twtrland has a massive database of people on Twitter and have categorized them into 60,000 categories.

Identify the influential people in categories relevant to your business and focus on building relationships with these people.
The more focused you are on Twitter the best results you will get.

6. Automate distribution of your blog content with Dlvr.it

Automation is often seen as a bad word in social media marketing but it’s essential.

You can’t automate building of relationships but you can automate some repetitive tasks and this frees up your time to spend more time building relationships.

When you publish a blog post you will always want to share it out to your social media networks you are part of. Dlvr.it allows you automate this.

You specify where Dlvr.it picks up a blog post and where you want Dlvr.it to send it. Dlvr.it will monitor your site and check for new blog posts and when you publish one it will automatically send it out.

Automate what makes sense and free up some more time for relationship building.

7. Use Google analytics so you can write more of what’s working

Do you regularly check Google analytics to review what content gets the most page views?

What about content that gets the least amount of pages views?

When you find content around a specific theme that gets a lot of page views this shows what is resonating with your audience. Think about what other content around this theme you can write.

Similarly if you find content that has low page views consider if this is the most relevant type of content to write.

Social media is very time intensive. To get more value from your social media efforts you need to ensure you are as productive as possible. The tools in this article we will.

How do you improve productivity? What tools do you use that can help?

Ian Cleary
Razorsocial

Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lox/9408028555