What are the best social media marketing resources? It can be overwhelming to look at all the different options out there. From marketing courses, eBooks and social media books to blog posts and Instagram guides — there is a lot to choose from. If you’re looking for an expert roundup of the most valuable social media resources, this article will help.
In this review, I will share with you, the best resources for the social media marketing.
For social media automation: Buffer
Designed to help you save time and get better results from your social media efforts, Buffer is an automation app that lets you schedule social media posts and share your content at the best possible times throughout the day for visibility and exposure.
It can also post to all of your social networks at once, helping you to eliminate a lot of the repetitive work that can eat into your free time as a social media manager. There’s even an image editor to help you add eye-catching, perfectly sized photos to your Facebook and Twitter updates.
Like most social media tools, Buffer works best when you already have an established and well managed social presence, but need some help trimming away some of the time that gets spent on things like scheduling posts, resizing images and posting across different platforms.
Since it includes rich analytics for your posts, you can also use Buffer to quickly and easily track campaign performance and determine which type of content works best for your target audience and brand.
We’re big believers in processes beating tools when it comes to efficiency. However, Buffer adds so much value to your social media workflow while saving a measurable amount of time, making it a must-have for busy social media managers and team members.
For content planning and strategy: Buzzsumo
Content is an essential component of effective social media marketing. In fact, for most brands, content is both the most important component of a social media campaign and one of the most difficult to produce.
Buzzsumo makes planning and producing content easier by giving you an instant look into the top-performing content for any topic, from the dryest of B2B subject matter to hot topics aimed at consumers and casual readers.
One of the easiest ways to use Buzzsumo effectively is to analyze top-performing content from your competitors.
For example, if you’re in charge of social media and content marketing for an online marketing software company, you can enter a domain such as www.nytimes.com and view a complete list of the site’s most successful blog posts, ordered by Facebook engagements, Twitter shares or links.
For managing your social media team: Trello
The key to a successful social media marketing campaign is a great team, and nothing is more important for effective teamwork than good communication. Trello lets you collaborate and efficiently work with your team members, helping you get more done in less time.With a few Trello boards, you can stay on top of your social media team’s daily and weekly to-do list, helping you publish content on time and avoid the delays, missed deadlines and other major issues that can define a poorly organized social media strategy.
There are numerous ways to use Trello as part of your daily social media workflow. Some of our favorites include:
- Making checklists for daily tasks that your team can check off over the course of the day, helping you stay aware of what your team members are working on at any time
- Using Trello as an editorial calendar, with cards for article ideas, blog posts that are currently being researched, concepts that have been put on hold and posts currently in progress
- Editing and perfecting posts before you publish by creating a new Trello card for every status update or tweet and inviting feedback from your social media marketing team before you publish
Whether you use Trello extensively or just as a barebones scheduling app for your social media work, having a visual display of your team’s ongoing and upcoming tasks can be hugely helpful for staying focused and getting things done as a social media manager.
Others
Social Media Marketing Tools
TweetDeck – A scheduling tool is a must for any social media marketer. Ensuring you don’t go silent on weekends, that you can cover all time zones, and generally making the planning and structure of your day easier.
BuzzSumo – Discover the most shared content around a particular topic or from a particular site.
FollowerWonk – A free tool by Moz that will give you a breakdown of any account’s followers. Who are your followers? Where are they located? When do they tweet?
Google Analytics – Discover which social sites are sending traffic to your website.
Google Alerts – Receive an email alert anytime your search term is mentioned. You can keep an eye out for any mentions of your brand online.
Google Trends – Discover the frequency with which people search for any term in Google. Useful for understanding trending topics in your industry to create relevant content.
Headline Analyzer – Analyze your headline to make it as click-worthy as possible. Useful for both blogging and social media posts.
Social Media and Analytics Tools
There is no shortage of tools to help you manage and analyze your social media efforts. Below is a collection of different tools to help with a variety of platforms and .
15 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
6 Free Instagram Analytics Tools
10 Top Social Media Management Tools
10 Free Twitter Analytics Tools
7 Free Influencer Marketing Tools
29 Free Writing Tools and Resources
15 Free and Paid Facebook Analytics Tools
Visual resources and tools
Social media posts with images in gain more engagement than those without. Finding copyright free images can be difficult if you can’t afford to pay for a subscription. Luckily, there are quite a few sites that offer free images.
- Unsplash
- Pixabay
- Gratisography
- Imcreator
- Picjumbo
- Negative Space
- Kaboom Pics
- Life of Pix
- Stocksnap
- Little Visuals
- Death to the Stock Photo
- Picography
- Burst
Social media image size cheat sheet – make sure your images are the optimal size for whichever platform you are posting to.
ResizeImage.net – if you need to resize or crop images, this tool is versatile and easy to use.
Infogr.am – allows you to create charts and infographics, visualizing data and ideas into shareable formats.
Video resources
Gary Vaynerchuk – The entrepreneur/author has a YouTube channel full of insights and tips. Have a search to discover if there is a video for your particular problem.
TED TALKS – this playlist has 12 great social media marketing videos, but you can search the TED website for more.
Never stop researching, analyzing, trialing and generally improving your social media marketing. It is such a fast moving world that even those with experience need to stay up to date by reading social media marketing resources. By keeping an eye on your social media metrics you can ensure that you are doing more of what works, and keep engaging your customers on social.
Facebook. The current 900 pound guerilla of websites whose traffic now exceeds Google.
- Facebook. Here’s the corporate spin. Worth tracking.
- InsideFacebook. Here’s the unofficial guide to Facebook for marketers and programmers. This should be in your RSS reader.
- AllFacebook. To help you keep up with the information.
- Facebook Marketing for Dummies. Written by Paul Dunay who blogs at Buzz Marketing for Technology.
- Chris Treadway and Mari Smith, Facebook Marketing She’s one of the Facebook experts. You can also follow her on Twitter.
Twitter. Provides the ability to communicate (i.e. microblog) in 140 character bites. It’s particularly useful for marketing purposes. There are a plethora of products created to support Twitter, often bearing cute names that start with “tw”.
- Twitter Blog. This is Twitter’s official blog.
- TweetDeck or Hootsuite. Applications to help manage Tweet stream, mentions and schedule future tweets.
- 99 Twitter Tools and Applications. Here’s an article from Smashing Magazine to get you started on Twitter tools. There has been a proliferation of Twitter tools and applications. It’s important to bear in mind that many people access Twitter from mobile devices such as smart phones and iPads.
- Thomases, Hollis Twitter Marketing Fellow ClickZ columnist Hollis’ book covers the subject in depth. At least follow her on Twitter!
- How to Get Your Twitter Mojo. Article to jump start on Twitter with 8 tips to be a sparkling conversationalist.
- How to be a Twitter Ninja. Article with 10 steps to master Twitter.
- Twitter Chat Schedule. For those who want to participate in chats.
- TweetGrid. Useful tool for participating in a Twitter chat.
LinkedIn. Professionally focused social media platform.
- LinkedIn Blog. This is the official blog of LinkedIn.
- Lewis Howes Blog. A former college football player, Lewis is one of the experts on LinkedIn.
- Jan Vermeiren How to REALLY use LinkedIn
- Neal Schaffer –Windmill Networking: Understanding, Leveraging & Maximizing LinkedIn (Book)
Blogging sources are an important component of any integrated social media marketing plan. They can also act as a CMS (Content Management System) and help search optimization.
- Copyblogger.Considered the bible of blogging, especially for business goals. Get this RSS feed so that you’re on top of the latest trends. Try the 31-day Blogging Challenge either as a paid download e-book or in its original blog post format, which takes searching to find.
- Problogger.Another must read for bloggers.
- Men With Pens. Blog focused on the art of writing from the perspective of copywriters.
- Blogs of Fortune 500. Good for checking how the big boys are blogging.
- 7 Points to Create Your Blog Voice. How do you create your blog’s personality and brand? This article has 5 exercises to help you.
- 12 Suggestions to Overcome Blank Blog Post Syndrome. Need help getting started writing. This article is the place.
- 12 Tactics to Grow Your Blog Audience (Flog Your Blog – Part 1). Tips for new and experienced bloggers expand their reach.
- 15 More Ways to Expand Your Blog Reach (Flog Your Blog – Part 2). These 15 blog audience growing suggestions are broken into six categories to help your marketing.
- Why Isn’t Anyone Coming to My Blog? Here’s an 8 point checklist to see where your blog may be missing the mark.
Online photos. Don’t overlook the power of online photographs in your marketing mix since most people can snap a shot with a non-smart phone. Further photographs enhance most other forms of content.
- 250+ Free Stock Photograph Sites. If you want more options than Flickr, look no more.
- A Complete Guide to Finding And Using Flickr Images. A must read to use other people’s photos correctly and quickly.
- Online Consulting Tips to Optimize Your Photos. Who doesn’t need help with their search optimization?
- Is a Photo Worth a 1,000 Words? Here are five tips to expand your photographs’ reach online.
YouTube. Largest online video platform. Its also the second biggest search engine so that you can’t overlook this 900 pound gorilla in your marketing plans, especially since it helps search optimization.
Conclusion
Finally,For students who are learning social media marketing, there are a lot of resources available on the internet. The advantage of these different sources is that they provide all the latest information to students free of cost. However, there can be many scams and advertisements on them. So you need to be careful while reading the content. That’s why our team has specifically made this list so that you can access all the information with ease.