This is 2015 and the phrase Social Media
Management has evolved a whole lot. It is simply much more than acquiring a chosen user name
with the top Social Media accounts and using them to stay in touch with the
people you know in the real World.
Here I am referring to the Social Media
Management for a professional use, which would help in the streamlining process
for the branding and content management for personal as well business
identities.
Although there are numerous tools available
which are notably popular amongst Social Media enthusiasts; but for the sole
purpose of keeping things simple, I am only mentioning the ones which are by
far simplest in terms of usage and are absolutely frugal.
Have a look and feel free to discuss your
experience(s) using them.
1. CANVA
Being a writer I have always struggled when
it comes to associating an appropriate picture or a graphic art with my
write-ups. I know that our very own Google has been a darling in providing an
option for using ‘labeled for reuse’ images. But sadly, that particular option
only takes care of the licensing problems, the dire need for an appropriate
graphic content to complement the written content is not addressed properly
with it. That is when I researched and got to know about CANVA.
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Canva is simply a graphic art designing
website that gives you numerous images based on the key-word that you provide.
They do ask for a dollar for buying them, but the free pictures are available
with their water-mark. Let the last part of the last statement not let you lose
your curiosity in Canva. It is because the water-mark is almost non-existent
with the careful camouflaging done by the minds at Canva.
By the way, the graphic art on this article
also uses water-marked images from Canva. I bet you checked twice to confirm that.
It goes without saying that Google
Analytics is the tool to administer all your campaigns on the World Wide Web.
It is pretty easy to configure with a basic Gmail account to access all the associated
statistics related to a website. For anyone not much obsessed with data (unlike
me) can do simply well with the basic information provided in the dashboard
report that comes up on the front page with statistics like – number of users,
page views per session, bounce rate et all with respect to different time
frames. As long these figures are in good health, everything would seem to be
working fine in general; but for specific campaign related stuff, the
CONVERSIONS feature of Google Analytics comes in handy. It can be used for
tasks which require to know activities on a campaign like “how much downloading
activity happened” to “how many registrations” and of course everything related
to the E-commerce arena. With power-packed features available for E-Commerce
tracking, everything related to a particular sale gets a deep-dive into a pool
of information. Sofrom the referral landings, time-lag in-between the purchases
to sales figures pinned down to locations,all will be at your disposal with few
clicks.
3. BUFFER
Even if anyone has been remotely associated
with any Social Media activity, they would surely agree on creating killer
content as a means to survive in the game. Time and again the particular task
of creating an engaging content has to be repeated in order to achieve time
stamp in the minds of the audience. Since the content cannot be created
magically all the time, in such a scenario application like Buffer comes to
rescue. One can simply create a lot of content and then schedule it to be
posted on specified time frames with the Buffer. Buffer then automatically
shares the content on those optimal time-frames (user-specified) in order to
receive maximum visibility. Also, the application allows sharing third-party
content that is doing the rounds on the internet via the user’s social handles.
This particular feature is very useful for interim periods of lag in-between sharing
of self-created content. It keeps the user base engaged with the relevant
content from other users while getting to see it shared by your own social
identities.
4. BITLY
Services offered by Bitly became popular
through Twitter’s stringent 140 characters service. Bitly simply shortens any
url so that it gets condensed to fit into the default character settings of
Twitter or any other social media. This one is my favourite of all and I simply
cannot do without it. Although Twitter also offers a url shoterning service,
but since it is only limited to Twitter, so I end up using Bitly a lot. One
particular shortened url works for all my social media handles and I also get
an accurate statistics on it with the insights that it’s advanced analytics
features provide. It is a great tool for spreading mass coupons and discounts.
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5. ZEMANTA
Zemanta is something I have on all my
blogging platforms as a default add-on. It is easily compatible with all the
major browsers and the moment content comes to the scene, it promptly starts
featuring relevant pictures and related content alongside the blogging window.
It also helps in suggesting context driven labels/tags and in-text links as
well. My favourite feature of Zemanta is the ‘Related Articles’; it gives the
user an option of including related content of fellow bloggers and in-return
allows the user’s post to be available for sharing by other Zemanta users. This
feature simply works as a Share-some-link-love and get it back thingy. You
never know when a little social sharing ends up serving as a good karma for
you.
Disclaimer: The content for this article is
entirely based on my experience of working things around in the Social Media
Sphere. I would love to know your experience with these tools and specifically
others that you are hooked on to for your campaigns.
