4 Tactics to Improve Your Daily Social Media Marketing Routine

#1: Add Credibility With Real-Time Sharing

In addition to creating and publishing content and engaging with your audience on social media, it’s important to keep up with trends in your industry.

There may be an important conference or breaking news within your niche that your audience needs to know about. Being the first to tell them helps build your company’s credibility.

To make sure you don’t miss the important information your audience needs to know, you can use Google Alerts and Brook.

Google Alerts make it easy to keep tabs on everyone else.

Google Alerts are easy to set up and configure. Just choose which search terms are most important to you (e.g., specific topics or events), complete the form and choose how often you’ll receive email updates.

You can set up as many alerts as you want, but if you’re just starting out I suggest sticking to two or three queries.

You may need to tailor a query a bit more to get the kind of information you want, or you may need to change how often you’re receiving alerts.

Once you have your system down, set up alerts for influencers in your industry, one for your competitors and one for mentions of your top-ranking keywords to see other related content people are sharing.

Another way you can keep up with trends in your industry is through the third-party Twitter tool Brook. It gives you a daily digest of the five best tweets from people you want to keep tabs on.

Use Brook to find real-time information on important issues.

When you first use Brook, it gives you recommendations on people you may know or want to follow. Carefully choose folks on Twitter who are important to your industry and regularly update with the kind of content you’d search for.

Keep in mind you’re using this tool to focus on real-time trends in your industry.

#2: Maximize Reach With Reshared Content

Your RSS feeds and Pocket can definitely help you take control of your curated content. But are you getting the most out of that content?

If you’re only sharing via social channels once, you’re missing out on new traffic to your site. Here’s an infographic from KISSmetrics on how multiple shares of one piece of content can impact how well that content performs.

Share and share again for best results.

When you share your newest content via social channels, change how you present it. Position it several different ways by adding a question or using a particularly interesting stat or snippet from whatever you’re linking to.

And find ways to share relevant content created by thought leaders in your industry, your peers and even your customers.

#3: Save Time With Automated Curation

Creating and finding relevant, interesting content is time-consuming, don’t you agree? I have two ideas on how you can optimize this process: RSS feeds and Pocket.

RSS lists are a useful way to gather great content from industry-specific websites I trust. RSS feeds bring that content to me so I don’t have to remember to go looking for it. I use Feedly to create my lists.

When you create a Feedly account, you can type in a search term that’s related to your business, and you can add any of the returned results to your Feedly RSS feed. In the example below, I typed in “social media.”

RSS brings shareable content to you as it’s available.

Now you have a running list of websites you can browse, read and pull content from to share to with your audience.

Of course, RSS isn’t the only way you’ll find content. As you read your own social profiles, you’re likely to find articles worth sharing, but it may not be the right time to share them (e.g., they may fit with an upcoming series on your editorial calendar).

In those cases you want to save the article for later. You can do that with an app like Pocket, which lets you save links in a central place.

Pocket keeps track of content for you.

Apps like Pocket give you a lot of flexibility in ways to store articles. For example, you can email links to your Pocket account or install browser plugins for one-click storage.

A lot of apps like Pocket are also integrated with services like Twitter so you can easily save content no matter where you are on the Internet.

#4: Get More Clicks With Optimized Updates

Are you optimizing your content for each social network you market on? If you’re not taking full advantage of the publishing nuances of each network, you’re probably missing the part of your audience you want to market to most.

Here are some examples of how you can get the performance you want from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

Twitter’s inline images make your tweets instantly more appealing and clickable, getting more out of your 140 characters than ever before. If you aren’t already, now is a good time to start using Twitter cards.

Snag attention in the Twitter feed with inline images.

Visual content is the crux of success on both Twitter and Facebook. Catching someone’s eye is the best way to get him or her to click through or share your content.

Facebook allots even more space to visual content than Twitter. Facebook users see larger versions of pictures, images and video.

Your business Facebook page works very well as a conduit for sharing your YouTube channel. Share compelling videos that provide important niche information, or better yet, entertaining content promoting your products or your company to encourage more clicks.

Videos are a good way to share important information.

When you embed a video in a Facebook update, your audience can watch it directly in their stream. They appreciate not being forced to another site to watch the video.

Twitter and Facebook aren’t good places for over-promotion. Your audience doesn’t care for it and may stop coming by for information.

Since LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, it’s really the place where marketers like you can talk about your company on a company page without sounding too self-promotional.

It’s more acceptable to self-promote on LinkedIn.

Your LinkedIn company page is where you should be putting any important company updates.

Not all of your content is relevant to each person in your audience. Google+ circles let you create tailored updates and share those updates with specific people or circles.

Google+ is ripe with opportunities to segment posts for different audiences.

Marketing directly to a smaller targeted audience can lead to much more interaction and even sales.

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5 Ways to Combine Twitter Scheduling With Real Time Activities

#1: Find Out When Your Followers Are on Twitter

The best way to reach your followers with your content is to know when your audience is online, and schedule your updates for these times.

A great tool to help you find those hours is Tweriod.

Tweriod looks at your followers’ recent tweets and provides you with analyticsand data that show when your followers are the most active.

All you have to do is adjust the days and times you post on Twitter.

Tweriod results show the optimal times for you to tweet.

To further optimize your tweet delivery, use these statistics to build a sharing pattern that capitalizes on user behaviors:

• Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends 
• Users are 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute
• Retweets have been shown to be highest around 5 pm 
• The best time to maximize your click-through rate (CTR) from Twitter is 1–3 pm 

Retweets have been shown to be highest around 5 pm.

#2: Share Content Throughout the Day to Maintain Visibility

Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, your followers and fans are based in different places and time zones, and that makes it almost impossible for you to be active in real time whenever they are.

It’s important to keep your social stream fully active with interesting content throughout the entire day to grow your position as a thought leader in your market.

While a good content strategy should include creating original content, it’s well worth your time to supplement your own content with content from others that’s relevant, interesting and new to your audience. More content means more updates, which means more visibility.

During your morning routine, use an online tool to help you find content, then schedule the posts for delivery.

Schedule your updates out over the day rather than publishing too many in a short period of time, and you’ll increase your CTR.

Here are a couple of tips to help as you add other people’s content into your shared updates:

• Start with sharing between 3 and 5 posts per day on each social network 
• Credit the source and the author of the article.
• Add your personal opinion to the post and the subject.
• Use images for greater exposure.

A slower posting pace equals a higher CTR.

#3: Schedule for Holidays and Events

Social media traffic is significantly greater during holidays and other major events and 57% of users turn to Twitter to determine what stores to visit. Now that you know, it’s up to you to catch their attention.

Buzz on Twitter peaked around key shopping dates.

High-traffic seasons are the best time to feed your audience with posts that offer special coupons to existing and new customers, or to show that your brand cares by highlighting its holiday giving.

To make the most of important dates, adjust your social media strategy to include updates or campaigns for each holiday or event that takes place for your customers.

Make sure to keep these tips in mind when you post during special times:

• Use seasonal hashtags like #lastminutedeals or #giftideas.
• Personalize your posts with your own images to drive better engagement.
• Pay to promote your posts and rise above the noise.

#4: Join Discussions in Real Time

Now that you’ve got your scheduled sharing in order, you can take time to join in real-time conversations when people are talking about your brand, your competitor and your market.

Here are three ways to find these conversations.

Mention

Use Mention to permanently follow your brand’s topics and keywords online.

Mention’s alerts panel.

Not only does Mention let you create alerts for relevant expressions you define, but you can blacklist irrelevant expressions to filter for more targeted alerts andfilter in specific languages, which is very useful for localization if you’re a global brand.

Hashtagify

Hashtagify lets you see which hashtags were trending on Twitter for the last week or month:

Hashtagify’s top-trending hashtags.

Because many industries have specialized conversations that are curated with hashtags, it’s a good idea to find hashtag conversations around your own brand or product.

Look for keywords that are related to your brand’s identity and search for a specific hashtag to see its popularity.

Hashtagify displays the popularity of a hashtag.

When you know which hashtags are best for you to follow, join a conversation with your real-time voice.

Tagboard

Tagboard makes it easy to check out and respond to all of the recent and trending tweets around any hashtag. Very helpful if your brand uses a unique hashtag to spark conversations.

Tagboard’s tweet results dashboard.

Use any of these tools to respond to mentions of your brand in a timely and proactive manner.

#5: Take Advantage of Real-Time Opportunity

Anticipating and scheduling posts for holidays and special events should be well-planned. But your team should also be prepared for marketing opportunities from real-time incidents such as sports games or political events.

During the XLVII Super Bowl, the lights in the stadium went out, causing an unexpected stop in the game.

Around 100 million viewers went to social media to express their frustration, where they found this brilliant tweet by Oreo:

Oreo’s Super Bowl tweet put their brand in the best light during a blackout.

Within the first hour, the tweet received 10,000+ retweets, 18,000+ favorites and 5000+ shares and the media went crazy over it.

The result of one well-timed, creative tweet: $0 spent on marketing, 525,000,000 earned impressions.

When uncommon events happen, the media turn to social media to get the answers, drama and creativity, and that’s where all brands have their chance to hit the spot.

Post a relevant, real-time update as soon as something happens and youincrease your chances for massive exposure. That’s effective social media marketing.

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How to Speed Up Your Content Curation Process

Why Content Curation?

If you want to be the go-to expert in your niche, you need to provide more value than the other guys. Content curation—sharing relevant articles from several sources—is an important way to provide that value to your clients, fans and readers.

Modern marketing has changed significantly. It’s less about promotion and more about helping your ideal clients make informed decisions. Buyers expect to be fed relevant and helpful information.

Good content curation pinpoints potential clients’ needs, wants, desires and problems, then offers answers and solutions. Sharing other people’s content is a great way to quickly become the recognized expert in your field.

It can take a lot of time to find and evaluate content that’s good enough to share. What if you could save that time and use it to be more productive? Keep reading because I’m going to show you my favorite content curation tools—Feedly and If This Then That (IFTTT)—and explain how to use them together to make content curation much easier.

#1: Use Feedly to Find Articles

Feedly is an awesome tool for finding timely articles on topics you want to share. On Feedly, you can find content and organize it by categories.

Feedly is a terrific tool for categorizing content you may want to share with your audience.

It’s pretty easy to get started with Feedly. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Feedly and set up an account (it just connects to your Gmail).
2. Use the search box to find topics you’re interested in. Feedly returns a list of websites or blogs that have the kind of content you’re looking for.
3. Click on a site you want to follow. The right side of the page shows you the top stories from that site so you can see if you really want to follow it.
4. If the site is what you’re looking for, click the Follow button. The Add a New Source sidebar slides out.
5. Give the website a category (you can create your own) and click Add.

I use Feedly to categorize content for my own social platforms, as well as my clients’ platforms.

#2: Use IFTTT (If This Then That) to Collect Feedly Articles

IFTTT (If This Then That) is one of the most useful tools I’ve come across on the web.It shaves hours off of research time by automating simple tasks.

In order to automate tasks, you create what’s called a recipe. For example, now that you’re set up on Feedly, you can create a recipe that sends new articles to a Google spreadsheet—without you doing a thing!

To create a recipe, go to IFTTT and sign in or create an account.

Create a recipe to send your Feedly finds to a spreadsheet on Google Drive.

Here’s how to create a recipe that sends Feedly articles to a Google Drive spreadsheet:

1. On your dashboard, click Create a Recipe.
2. On the next page, click “this” (you’ll see what I mean when you’re there).
3. Scroll through the Trigger Channels until you find Feedly, then click it and activate it.
4. On the Choose a Trigger page, click the New Article from the Category option.
5. Use the menu to choose which article category you want to send to the spreadsheet, then click Create Trigger.
6. Click “that” (again, you’ll see what I mean when you’re there).
7. Scroll through the options until you find Google Drive, then click it and activate it.
8. On the Choose an Action page, click the Add Row to Spreadsheet option.
9. On the Complete Action Fields page, name your spreadsheet and leave everything else the same.
10. Click Create Action, then click Create Recipe.

Instead of scanning news sources every day, you can simply download the spreadsheet about once a week and work your way through it, looking for helpful, relevant content to share.

The beauty of creating the spreadsheet on Google Drive is that you can access it anywhere. If you’re out of the office and have a few moments to spare, you can go through the spreadsheet on your tablet.

The downloaded articles are ready for reviewing on Google spreadsheet.

#3: Choose and Curate Content

Use the spreadsheet to choose which articles are most relevant to your audience. Once you whittle down the articles to ones that are share-worthy, I suggest writing a status update you can schedule on Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. (I usuallywrite the status update in the Title cell to keep track of it.)

You’ll notice I didn’t mention Facebook in that list. That’s because:

• It’s generally better to use Facebook’s Scheduling tool so your posts are more prominent in the news feed.
• When you use content management apps like HootSuite to share content on Facebook, sometimes the images don’t show.

The extra effort to schedule via Facebook’s tool is well worth it.

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8 New Ways Content Curation And Social Media Marketing Are Now Easier

Gone are the days that posting a few times per day on social media accounts and expecting to get any meaningful results. The tenacious appetite for relevant content from social network users is growing daily. Consistently finding, scheduling and posting relevant, valuable curated content that is interesting to your target audience has become far more challenging for social media agencies, marketers and brands. The ability to control all aspects of the process, yet garner massive time savings with result driven capabilities are paramount to competing in this environment.

If you don’t have time to focus on engagement and building relationships, you are not getting results. If you are spending time scheduling content posts, you’re not engaging. If your social media automation isn’t providing an efficient work-flow solution for content management, you’re going to like what we are about to share with you.

Bundle Post is announcing the release of its version 3.0, which is packed with 8 new upgrades that make content curation and social media marketing even easier. The improvements contained in this release are far from simple. In fact, this package of upgrades is revolutionary in terms of functionality, efficiency and social media posting control.

Of the seven new advancements, five are for all user types and two of the new features are Pro user only capabilities that we know you’re going to go crazy over. So let’s dive into the 3.0 and show you the powerful functions that have been included.

1) Feed Attribution - (Pro Accounts Only)

You can now attribute an entire feed channel to an author, website or even add hashtags to posts from a specific Google alert.

• Support for by/via @ mention attributions.
• Manually edit a specific post attribution on the export table.
• Edit/add feed channel attribution at any time.
• Automatically manages every posts character length for you.

Let’s say you have an RSS feed from a specific website or blog already added into Bundle Post and you want to attribute the posts you use from that feed channel to the site/author whenever you use their content. All you have to do is edit the attribution field next to their feed channel with something like “by @BundlePost”. From then on when you select content from their feed channel on the export table, the system will append by @BundlePost to the text of each post.

Maybe your brand has a specific hashtag (like #weRockFood) that you use with your community and want to append that hashtag to all of your content from your blog when you share it on social sites. Next to your blogs feed channel in Bundle Post, add #weRockFood in the attribution field for that feed and the system will append it to each post when you export.

If all this wasn’t enough, we have also added the attribution function to the Bundlet Chrome extension. When you add a new RSS feed channel to Bundle Post using the Bundlet, you will be able to set attribution right then and there!

There are so many awesome uses for the attribution feature, but what is really cool is that the system will always adjust the number of characters in the text of posts with attribution assigned, ensuring the character limit requirements are handled for you and room is made for your attribution. What’s more, though you set attribution for an entire feed channel, you are able to edit specific attributions manually on the export table if you desire.

Finally, we don’t overwrite the text of posts in feed channels with the attribution text, we append the attribution only during an export, so you can change attribution at any time in the future and on your next export the new attribution will be live without effecting all the posts in that channel with the previous attribution.

2) Time Slot Control - (Pro Accounts Only)

When doing an export, there are times you may want to remove specific date/time slots from an export, without having to open the file after exporting and manually making the changes. (we recommend you never open/edit export files as it changes the formatting of special characters) But maybe you want to lighten the number of posts you have over the weekend, or you need to do an export starting at today’s date but it’s already three hours passed the first time slot in a given schedule.

Now you can toggle specific date and time slots on/off from the export table, without effecting the actual schedule you are using. To remove a specific posting date/time, click the blue clock icon at the left of the post. This will remove that time slot from the export for that date only, leaving that time slot active for previous and future days within the export. You can toggle a removed time slot back on if you change your mind, by clicking the grey clock icon again.

When you shut off a specific date/time, the system will automatically move the post that was in that slot down one time slot for you. The removed time slot will remain on the screen as a blank post and will not be exported at all, allowing you to easily see the time slots you have toggle off.

3) Redesigned Export Table

We have made some substantial improvements to the Export Table design and functionality, making managing hundreds of feed channels, folders and content much more efficient and user-friendly. The left column containing your huge list of Feed Channels, My Content, Queues, Follow Friday and Hashtag folders, requiring you to scroll over and over is now gone. We have replaced the left column with simple and clean drop down buttons on the top of the page, allowing you to easily access content and other functions without having to scroll.

By cleaning up the main part of the export table, we were able to spread the post table all the way out, making a much more simplified view with all posts taking up a single line. The new main export table section is more compact, yet easier to view and gives more room for additional functionality we are adding today as well as future capabilities to come.

4) Last Used

Knowledge is power, when you use the knowledge effectively. We believe it’s incredibly helpful and important to track the dates you last used a piece of content in the system, as well as the last date you exported for a specific schedule in the system. Easily having access to this information enables to you better plan your next required content scheduling for a particular social media account and what content you have not shared in a while.

Now, all content, schedules and feed channel posts are tracked and given date/time stamps, clearly showing you when it was last used in an export from the system.

We took this further and added the same tracking to all folders in the system as well. Finally, we also display the date and time every single piece of content in the system was last scheduled and even show you last exported and scheduled post dates when you start a new export as show below.

We believe tracking and providing this information to our users will enable them to better plan campaigns and be more effective with the short and long-term use of their content marketing.

5) Character Length Handling

The Bundle Post system now automatically corrects the character length of your posts at all times. Whether you are using the new attributions, edit the text of a post or auto-hashtag, Bundle Post will calculate character length and ensure that you are within the proper limits for uploading into the dashboard of your choice.

You will no longer have posts that sneak by with a few too many characters, causing an error when you upload to Hootsuite or other dashboards.

6) Hashtag Reminder

How many times have you exported your scheduled content and uploaded it and realized you forgot to run hashtags? We have too. Now Bundle Post will remind and ask you before downloading your export file if you have not yet run hashtags on the export. We keep track if you have done and don’t nag you, so you’ll only see the reminder if you forget.

7) Content Source Colors

We have made some changes to the export table colors we know you’re going to appreciate. The system handled this terribly before, in that only each feed channel received a different color, but all other content from other folder sources were kept the same color. Now:

• A newly modified color scheme, contrasts and sequence make it easier to differentiate from content types/sources.
• A different color will be assigned to content coming from each different folder, not just feed channels.

8) Insert a Post

You can now manually create and insert a post into the export table in real-time. Posts inserted this way are not saved to the database, but are exported with all of your other posts. A great way to add posts to an export on the fly.

Ok, so we couldn’t stop at 8 new features. Though there are quite a few other unnamed changes, enhancements and improvements that you will quickly notice, we will layout just three more bonus upgrades for you here.

**BONUS Upgrades**

1) Export Auto-Naming:

We have added an additional bonus enhancement that is not really a new feature, but we know it will be something you’ll love. Bundle Post now automatically names your export files using the name of the schedule plus the dashboard platform you exported it for. It also appends the date at the end so you can easily identify the newest export you downloaded for that schedule, platform or client. It looks something like this – Client A – Twitter-Bundlepost-export-for-hootsuite-Dec-20-2013.csv

2) More Schedule Posting Times:

When adding multiple time slots to a schedule with start and ending times, you used to only have options for on the hour, the fifteens, half and three-quarter hours. Bundle Post 3.0 allows you to create schedule posting times that are far more varied and ensuring that your social media posts are going at non-standard times each hour of the day.

3) RSS Error Handling: 

The new Bundle Post Feed Channel page has been highly improved with some new functions and improved error handling.

First, we have added an Update All Feeds option that allows you to force the system to ingest the latest content for all of your feeds in the system at once. This process can be time-consuming if you have several feed channels in the system, but prevents you from having to manually update feeds in between the three times per day automatic function already in place.

Secondly, we have added error handling for feed channels. This new process handles two main functions; 1) It ensures that the URL you add for a feed channel is formatted properly (example: contains the http://) and if it is not done correctly, the system automatically fixes it for you. 2) If a feed channel you have added to the system stops working or is not ingesting content, it will automatically flag that feed channel with a  image next to the RSS having an issue. This alerts you that something is wrong with the source of the RSS, it has been entered wrong and is not updating, or otherwise isn’t a supported feed source.

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