Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

Ian Cleary of RazorSocial recently published an infographic highlighting the daily tasks of a social media marketer. But what’s really useful about this infographic isn’t a rundown of daily tasks. It’s the 29 tools.

Some of these tools you may already know about, but here’s a quick rundown of the highlights:

Learning and content curation tools

• Downcast – This is an iOS (Apple) app that let’s you and listen to podcasts directly from your iOS device without the need to sync with iTunes. Perfect for iPhone and iPad users on the go.
• Evernote  – There are thousands of things you can do with Evernote, including curating, creating and organizing content. My friend Joe Waters is a huge Evernote fan.
• Zite – This is a magazine app that helps you discover content based on your interests. Personally, I like Flipboard.
• Feedly – Imagine if Google Reader was reborn looking beautiful and easy to use, and you’ll have an idea of what Feedly is.

Content publishing tools

• AWeber – This is an email marketing tool that’s super popular with bloggers and small businesses. Most nonprofits use Constant Contact or Mailchimp, but AWeber is definitely worth a look.
• WordPress – The best blogging (and website) platform on the planet. Enough said.

Scheduling tools

• dlvr.it – This tool allows you to schedule and share content on almost every major social media platform. It includes many notification and analytics features that you can learn about here.
• PostPlanner –  This tool is a must for any Facebook manager. Particularly if you manage multiple Facebook pages or have multiple administrators. It even has an excellent content curation feature!
• Buffer – With Buffer, throw content in a hopper that spits it out at predetermined times. I use Buffer every morning to schedule retweets from specific Twitter Lists I’ve created.
• Hootsuite – Another tool you probably already know about, HootSuite is a must-have for any social media marketer. It allows you to manage multiple Twitter streams, schedule and post content to multiple platforms, and even publish beautiful analytics reports.

Facebook contest tools

• Agora Pulse – I recently used this to develop a custom quiz app for a breast cancer foundation. The app worked beautifully, allowing me to acquire emails and analyze engagement rates in the process.
• ShortStack – This tool allows you to run any type of photo contest or giveaway, in addition to creating any type of custom tab you can imagine. No coding required, but yet highly customizable.

Monitoring tools

• Mention – Create alerts for mentions of your name, your brand, your cause and even your competitors on the web and social networks. I haven’t use this myself, but I’ve only heard good things.

Analytics tools

• Google Analytics – In my opinion a must-have for every social media marketer. Over the past year, Google Analytics has undergone a major overhaul to make measuring social media more meaningful.
• Tailwind – If you use Pinterest, you will want to use Tailwind. With Tailwind you can track follower repins, likes and comments, and even drill down into content performance by category, board, keyword and #hashtag.

Infographic on how to make your marketing more productive

Check out all 29 tools mentioned in the infographic below:

The post 29 essential tools for social media marketers appeared first on Socialbrite.

HootSuite, Post Planner, Buffer can provide productivity boost

Guest post by Shonali Burke
VP Digital, MSL, Washington, DC

When it comes to staying on top of social media, one of the big challenges we have is to find the social media tools that will help us achieve a happy medium between curating, listening, engaging and producing content.

Frankly, I think that sweet spot is tough to find, and when we do find it, it stays with us for a while before it goes dancing off into the sunset, leaving us to figure it out all over again.

What to do? There are a ton of tools — and new ones coming out nearly every day — that purport to help us do this. I haven’t tested all of them, of course, but of those I have tested, here is what I currently think is the holy trinity of managing social media.

HootSuite: Scheduling updates made easy

1I’ve been a HootSuite fan for a long time. It’s a terrific way to post to a number of social networks, schedule posts and listen in on what’s going on, either by creating dedicated searches or creating streams of Twitter lists you’ve set up.

While I don’t use this tool to post to LinkedIn, etc., as much as I could, what I do find very useful, in addition to the publishing/scheduling dashboard, is the ability to monitor and post to Facebook Groups directly from HootSuite:

Typically I like to do my Facebook work “in” Facebook, but I know plenty of people who’d rather do all their Facebook management from a third-party app. And this fits the bill.

And just to go back to the scheduling feature, when people ask me to help them promote specific events, fundraisers, etc. I find the easiest way to do so is to schedule a ton of posts in HootSuite. (Assuming, that is, that those are things I want to help promote.) I find this feature very useful; I can simply copy a post and bung it in at various points in the “publisher” view, making minor edits if I want.

So if you are really pressed for time, then I honestly don’t know of a better one-stop management shop for the primary social networks than HootSuite.

Post Planner: The easiest way to schedule Facebook updates

2I’ve also been a fan of Post Planner for a long time. I find the team extremely responsive and the app just superb. Sure, you can post to Facebook from a number of different apps (including HootSuite), but PP rules, in my book, because:

• There’s nothing like having your own branded footer, as I wrote about a while back.
• Even though Facebook has recently introduced the ability to schedule posts, the feature is extremely clunky, and Post Planner makes it a breeze.

• Post Planner now lets you create lists of Pages and Groups to schedule posts to (though if you’re smart, you’ll still send them out at different times, but at least now you don’t have to schedule the same post over and over again).
• Its “status ideas” feature is just genius.

• You can syndicate your blog posts to Facebook via your RSS feed.
• If you don’t want your posts publishing automatically, you can still set up the RSS feature but set the publishing option to “suggest,” so that you can then send/not send out posts, or edit the accompanying status, as you wish.
• You can give posting rights to a team for group posting, which is terrific! The app costs a little more if you add this feature, but I think it’s worth it.
• Analytics, which can help you figure out not just which type of post performs the best, but when.

Buffer: Integration with Google Reader

3I love Buffer, and not just because Jay Pinkert posted such a thorough write-up of it on Spin Sucks. Buffer has made a lot of changes in recent months. It introduced an iPhone app not too long ago, and while that’s still a little clunky, overall it works pretty well.

But why would I need Buffer when I have HootSuite and Post Planner, you might ask?

Here is what makes Buffer critical for me: It integrates with Google Reader. And though most of the posts I share on a regular basis are through my participation in various Triberr groups or “tribes,” my Google Reader is a critical component of my reading and learning.

So I use Buffer to schedule posts when I:

• See a really great post in my Reader and know that’s something I’ll want to share. This becomes particularly important if there are bloggers I read/learn from regularly with whom I’m not connected on Triberr.

• Want to share posts as a backup to Triberr.
• Am on the go and want to schedule posts from my iPhone or iPad; Buffer integrates with the RSS+ app (on my iPhone) and Mr. Reader (on my iPad). Note, I find it works better on the latter.

Though I have set up Buffer so that I could post to Facebook and LinkedIn from the platform, I usually don’t. This is for two reasons:

1. My primary platform for content curation is Twitter. So they typically contain the @ handle of the blogger publishing that post, etc. And I believe updates with a significant amount of “platform-ese” or terms specific to a certain platform are best reserved for use on that platform alone;
2. I like Post Planner better for Facebook (or posting directly to Facebook), and I’m just not very active on LinkedIn at all.

Recently, Buffer has also integrated with Twitter and Facebook, so you have another way to schedule posts to either platform (i.e. buffer them). That is very useful, but since I’m used to HootSuite and Post Planner, I haven’t really used that feature yet.

Strengths of the three platforms

So, to summarize:

1. HootSuite rocks posting to multiple platforms, scheduling and “pay it forward” karma kind of tweets.

2. Post Planner rocks posting to Facebook probably better than Facebook will ever manage.

3. Buffer rocks sharing posts from Google Reader, from your laptop as well as while on the go (and you can also use it as an alternative to scheduling via the two platforms above).

There you have it: my holy trinity of managing social media. I hope this is helpful! Please tell me: What are your favorite apps/platforms to manage your personal/company social media presence? Are there other platforms I should be looking at? Why? What has your experience of Post Planner, HootSuite and Buffer been? I’d love to know.

The post 3 key tools for managing social media appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Cause organizations, NGOs, nonprofits, foundations, social enterprises, political reformers, educators, journalists, general public.

Over the past three years, as regular readers know, Socialbrite has put together dozens of guides and compilations of resources and tools for social change advocates. See the bottom of this article for a few, and our Sharing Center is all about social tools for social change.

To celebrate Internet at Liberty, a conference on protecting protecting freedom of expression on the Internet that Google is organizing in Washington, D.C., this week — and where Socialbrite is running the social media workshops — we’re launching a new section today:

The Social Advocacy Toolkit features new and updated informational guides, tool roundups and resources for global activists, social good advocates, political reformers, NGOs and anyone looking to use online tools for social change. It includes tactics for effective campaigns, guides to the best monitoring and metrics tools (many of them free), lists of enabling platforms and organizations and other resources to help galvanize your campaign.

Below is a new guide that we’ve put together to help social change activists with their advocacy efforts, which we’re adding to the toolkit. Check out the Social Advocacy Toolkit for much more.

10 tools for activists & social change advocates

Asana: A leap ahead for productive teamwork

1Asana is a work-collaboration software suite that came out of beta in April 2012. “We built this company to change the world,” said founder Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook. Asana offers a simple, word processor-like interface to give people working together on a task a central place to discuss the project, share files and keep track of to-dos in real time. It’s free for teams of fewer than 30 users.

Alternatives: Yammer, Microsoft Sharepoint (for larger enterprises) and see our Collaboration roundup

PopVox: Advocate your cause in Congress

2You might remember our recent article on PopVox, an online service that individuals and grassroots organizations can use to lobby members of Congress on behalf of a cause. CEO Marci Harris founded the nonpartisan service based on her knowledge of how Congressional staffers interact with the public. For a cause to be effective, it has to be made concrete on behalf of or against a specific bill. PopVox helps you do that.

Geo-bombing with Google Earth

3I was blown away when I saw Tunisian activists from the collective blog Nawaat.org (The Core) link video testimonies of Tunisian political prisoners and human rights defenders to the Tunisian presidential palace’s location on Google Earth. Now, as you fly over the Tunisian presidential palace using a Google Earth KML file, you will see it covered with videos about human rights abuses that strongman Ben Ali tried to prevent Tunisian citizens from watching by blocking YouTube and DailyMotion. Visit earth.google.com/outreach for more examples. We’d like to see more organizations to take up “geo-bombing.”

Mapping tools: Show, don’t tell

4Any campaign or cause organizations with tech talent should consider following the steps of charity: water, which does a remarkable job of documenting their clean-water projects for individual donors through the use of Google Maps. Paull Young, their director of digital engagement, told me: “We’ve been marking all our water projects with GPS since we were founded in 2006. We had a developer crank for a few weeks late last year to create this new mapping solution. It’s not incredibly technically difficult, the hardest part is getting data from the field. You might also want to check out our Dollars to Projects reporting for even more in-depth personalized mapping.” Also doing a good job with Google Maps: A Child’s Right.

Note: Google began charging for its previously free Google Maps API last year, leading to an exodus to the open source OpenStreetMap, which we expect will continue to get better and better.

Tableau Public: Infographics made simple

5You may have noticed the Infographics Everywhere trend that’s sweeping the Web, probably spurred by the fact that infographics has been democratized — you no longer need to be a graphics guru to make a swift-looking graphic. Why not boil down your cause or campaign to a couple of key infographics? The tool we like best is Tableau Public, because it’s good and it’s free. For visualizations, Wordle and Many Eyes create great-looking word clouds. But before you plunge in, see this fantastic set of Data Visualization and Infographics Resources from Smashing Magazine — and make sure what you create isn’t info porn.

Statf.ly: Create a metrics dashboard

6What’s a campaign without a metrics dashboard, to tell you with data-driven evidence what’s resonating with your community — and what’s falling flat? There are a few newcomers to consider: Statf.ly (we like the 30-day free trial and $19/month pricetag), Sparkwi.se and Metricly. It’s worth the investment. See which one works for you and gives your campaign traction and tweak your campaign on the fly.

Dropbox: Life in the cloud is sweet

7I’ll be straight up: My hands-down favorite productivity and collaboration tool of the decade so far has been Dropbox. What was life like before the cloud? Oh, yeah, it was a pain to get stuff done. Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs and videos anywhere with an Internet connection — and share them easily. Any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website. Never email yourself a file again! Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage space for free, plus 500MB more if you refer a friend who signs up. It can get pricey when moving up to Dropbox for Teams, so see what your budget allows.

CitizenTube: Get visibility for your cause videos

8CitizenTube is YouTube’s News and Politics Blog. You’ll find important breaking news videos from citizens and other newsworthy videos from news organizations, activists and politicians. You are creating your own media, right? Why not get it seen by YouTube’s legion of viewers? See a different version of it here, and follow @CitizenTube on Twitter.

Buffer: Cross-posting nirvana

9If you’re running a cause campaign, there aren’t enough hours in the day, right? So think productivity. Shonali Burke, who recently left Socialbrite, told me: “Buffer is killer. It lets you send updates to Facebook, Twitter, etc. straight from your Google Reader or a browser. You can also post them directly from Buffer. Spread them out over the day. I’m just loving it and using HootSuite less. I tend to do most of my reading via Reader, and it’s super easy to star the posts that interest me, then sort by starred items, and then add to Buffer.” The basic version is free, for up to 10 posts at a time; for heavy users, you can get the paid version.

GroupMe: Keep in touch with your team members

10If you’re at an event — a conference, a street protest, a peaceful march — with other team members, you know how difficult it it to stay in touch and to coordinate plans. Socialbrite recently gave GroupMe a test run and came away impressed. GroupMe is a free group messaging app. I like it because it’s both instant and asyncronous — that is, your teammates will see your updates instantly or when they next check their mobile devices. Call up GroupMe and invite others in your posse to join your private group. Type your update and send it to the group, as you would an SMS message, and they’ll see it in a chat thread. One of GroupMe’s key features is that it’s cross-platform: You don’t miss a beat whether you have an iPhone, Android, Blackberry or another kind of smartphone. In addition to the ability to share messages, photos and locations like the other apps, GroupMe also allows old-fashioned conference calls between group members.

Alternative: Facebook Messenger

Other tools worth a shoutout

The tools above aren’t the only ones that should be in your advocacy arsenal. Consider some of these as well:

• See our writeup on Digital Democracy and its Handheld Human Rights mobile platform for human rights in Burma/Myanmar.

• GeoChat, from InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters), is a collaboration tool that allows anyone to chat, report and get alerts on their cellphone and to map data on Google Earth, Google Maps or Virtual Earth. It uses SMS, email, and Twitter.

• Ushahidi and Frontline SMS are must-have mobile tools for anyone working with remote communities or in disaster relief areas. And they have broader uses as well.

• Join.me is a cross-platform screen sharing app that lets you give control of your computer screen to someone else.

• Shortstack, says my partner John Haydon, “is my number one choice for creating amazing Facebook Page custom tabs. You can create photo contents, reveal tabs, photo galleries and more. Check out this example of what you can create with Shortstack.” It costs $15 a month to start.

• NodeXL is a tool for finding connections between people or organizations. Mostly for geeks as it’s a bit daunting.

• If This, Then That is another interesting tool I just discovered. It helps you create certain actions when a task is triggered, like “send me a text message when my organization is mentioned on Facebook.”

• Jing from TechSmith, Screenr and Screenflow for Mac are three of the best tools for creating screencasts.

Guides for social change advocates

Here are some of Socialbrite’s other guides for social change:

• Change-makers share 10 of their favorite tools (JD Lasica)
• 12 open source tools you should be using (Kim Bale)
• 12 awesome platforms for social good (Katrina Heppler)
• An educator’s 5 top tools for social change (Barbara K. Iverson)
• Top 5 tools for the entrepreneurial journalist (Dan Pacheco)
• A change agent’s top 5 tools for social change (Allyson Kapin)
• A developer’s 5 favorite social tools (Nathan Freitas)
• 6 productivity tools for social change (Katrina Heppler)
• Complete guide to creating a video project (Tim Davies)

Related

• Making media: Tools & resources for nonprofits and social change organizations (Socialbrite)
• 10 top collaboration tools for your organization
• The Socialbrite Sharing Center
• Directory of cause organizations (Socialbrite)

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