10 indispensable online tools for managing your social presence

Keeping several social media platforms populated with fresh, unique content every day of the week is no easy task. Luckily, there are a number of easy-access online tools that are designed to help you organize and manage every aspect of your brand's social presence.

Keeping several social media platforms populated with fresh, unique content every day of the week is no easy task.

From sourcing influencers to promote your brand, to tracking brand mentions and reputation, to pushing out content in a timely fashion, there are a lot of balls to keep in the air, and if you aren’t meticulously on top of everything, it can be easy to drop a few.

Luckily, there are a number of useful, easy-access online tools out there designed to help you organize and manage your brand’s social presence.

We’ve compiled a few to help with each stage of the process.

Finding influencers

BuzzSumo

This online tool (also available as a Chrome extension) allows you to search a keyword or a domain and see the most-shared articles for that topic.

For example, a search for ‘content marketing’ returns a selection of highly popular articles, including the number of times each has been engaged with on Facebook, and shared on LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+. Pro Users have access to exports, complete results and backlinks.

This helps you to find both the most popular content in a given field, and the influencers writing it.

Klear

Aimed specifically at helping marketers find social media influencers, Klear offers several free analytics tools to help you find the most powerful members of social media communities. Search for a name or a ‘skill’ and refine results by platform (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Blogs) or location.

This tool is ideal if you’re looking to orient yourself in a sector you’re not familiar with. A search for ‘Fashion’ on Twitter, for example, returns a short summary of the Fashion community followed by a comprehensive list of names.

Individual results are scored for Influence, Engagement Level and ‘True Reach’ and includes samples from all relevant social media channels. These can be added to custom campaigns and used to track mentions, engagement and new fans.

 

Research

Feedly

Feedly lets you pull together content from several sources around the web into themes or ‘collections’ that you can view in one place – similar to an RSS feed. Alerts can be set up for certain keywords (like “Elon Musk” ❤), and a Chrome plugin lets you add content to a feed with one click.

It lets you get a good grasp on what’s being written about a topic area, and can be a great source of content for your social channels. It also allows you to save stories to read later, share stories directly to social media, email to friends and more.

Pocket

Possibly my favorite of all these tools, Pocket is an incredibly simple idea, well-executed. One button allows you to save the URL of any webpage to a your ‘Pocket’ – a page with a list of thumbnails.

Uber-useful for those ‘I remember reading something about that’ moments, it also offers the ability to tag content, as well as providing a few ‘top trending’ suggestions that might pique your interest. The ‘Pocket’ feature is available on the web, in emails and now within apps.


Multi-platform management

Hootsuite

This ‘Social Media Management Dashboard’ allows you to manage multiple platforms simultaneously. Hootsuite is pretty comprehensive, covering Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Vine.

It allows you to do some other cool stuff, too. A free plan gives you access to features like scheduling content in advance, lead capture campaigns, apps (including MailChimp, Dropbox and YouTube), simple analytics and video courses to teach you the basics. Paid plans power you up with real-time analytics, contest templates and customer branded URLs.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is another dashboard tool that lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously. Its customizable ‘stream’ layout lets you easily view multiple profiles, mentions, notifications and the feed of any hashtag you can think of, making it useful for tracking hashtag campaigns and brand mentions.

Tweet from multiple accounts, add images, and schedule tweets in advance with a few clicks.

Stock Photos

Pexels

A fantastic, free resource for high-quality, royalty free images. Most are relatively abstract – great for backgrounds and cover photos. However, the high quality means the content isn’t updated that frequently.

Pixabay

Pixabay offers a broad selection of free-to-use stock images, including vector images and icons, but high-quality images are rare. Useful for adding to articles, tweets and Facebook posts. If you’re serious about content creation, I’d recommend you fork out for a paid platform like Shutterstock or Thinkstock.

Creating & editing images

Infogr.am

Infographics are a hugely popular and shareable medium to communicate information. But you need a designer to create them, right? Wrong. Infogr.am is one of several free tools you can use to create graphics, icons and infographics.

With a drag-and-drop interface, you can easily create colorful charts, infographics, interactive maps and data visualizations.

Pixlr

Pixlr offers two products, both available free and online. Pixlr Express is a simple photo editing tool that lets you add overlays, filters and stickers to existing images. Pixlr Editor is an in-browser photo editor that includes layers, effects and lets you create images from scratch.

Analytics, customer care and marketing

Of course there’s even more to the process of managing social media than the tools we’ve listed here can cover.

Don’t miss our other articles which cover how brands can use social analytics effectively, how to nail customer service on social media, and how to organize your brand’s social media marketing.

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