Image credit: Shutterstock.com. Used under license.Bloggers, Podcasters and Web TV content creators converged in Las Vegas this past weekend for New Media Expo (NMX). NMX, which has immediately preceded the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) the past two years, invited guests to learn and network with some the most successful new media content creators in their respective fields. The event featured three days of educational sessions presented by more than 175 industry leaders.
This was my third time attending, and I really enjoyed both the sessions and the networking. One of the sessions I particularly enjoyed was one on social media tools to become a more productive and effective blogger. I’m both a social media marketer as well as a blogger, so this topic was especially appealing. Although I went in thinking I’d be familiar with most of the suggestions, there were a few I had not yet pursued and didn’t know much about, so I walked away with some valuable takeaways.
Presented by Ian Cleary, the session covered a lot of bases and was thoroughly entertaining. Ian’s Irish accent and outgoing personality were evident from the get-go, and he was simply entertaining to watch throughout the duration of the term. His company, RazorSocial, is one of the world’s leading providers in the delivery of independent advice in relation to social media tools and social media technology, allowing him to offer a lot of first-hand insight to how to use the tools.
Here are 10 social media tools for bloggers mentioned during Ian’s presentation:
- Social Crawlytics allows you to explore where your competitor’s content is being shared and promoted. This is especially useful because if content surrounding your own blog or niche is being widely shared and discussed in a certain space, your content would probably do well there, too.
- Topsy searches content published on Twitter and the web, and sorts it by relevancy or date. It’s basically like a search engine for Twitter and can definitely be useful if you want to see how long ago or how often you shared a certain post, for example.
- SEM Rush collects massive amounts of SERP data for more than 95 million keywords and 45 million domains. More so an SEO tool than a social one, SEM Rush is a great competitor-monitoring option as it allows you to identify what keywords are driving traffic to their websites.
- Canva gives you everything you need to easily turn ideas into stunning designs. If you’re unable to afford a graphic designer, create images simply and cheaply with Canva’s straightforward photo-editing program.
- Social Oomph allows you to queue reservoir content. You can schedule a specific blogpost to go out via Twitter once a month, for example, and Social Oomph will take care of it for you, and construct the tweet in various ways each time.
- Zapier connects the web apps you use to easily move your data and automate tedious tasks. An example of a Zap would be: When I a post a new video on YouTube, post a tweet to my Twitter feed. You can monitor activity in your dashboard, manage your connected accounts, and turn Zaps on and off anytime you want.
- DoShare is a Google Chrome plugin that allows you to write and schedule Google+ posts. It works for personal Google+ profiles as well as Google+ pages and you can easily share a post to Google+ from any tab within Chrome.
- Brand24 helps you monitor and analyze the presence of brand online, wherever it is talked about and whoever talks about it. If it becomes tedious to track all your Twitter mentions, this platform will do it for you.
- Open Site Explorer finds mentions of your brand name and relevant industry terms in the freshest content on the web. You can check your online authority against the authority of your competitors and go through the process of better optimizing your content for SEO.
- Triberr is a blog amplification and content discovery platform. You can join tribes with people of your choosing or others in your industry, and help promote each other’s content.
One thing I really appreciated about this list is its diversity. It covers everything from SEO, to analyzing competition, to amplifying content in new ways, to sharing content in new ways. Most of these can be used in conjunction with most others to really help bloggers take their posts to new levels.
What other social media tools have helped you leverage your blog or website?
