With so many tools available for content marketing and social media, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, so when the Social Times ran this infographic on their site, it caught my attention as useful for a weekend share. PSA: the Social Times has a fantastic email newsletter that comes out every morning and summarizes the major social media stories of the day.
Typically, I take a bite-sized approach and test out a few tools at a time. Of the 25 tools on this list, there are four I’ve had some experience with and here are three that I’d put my name on:
1. Buffer. Buffer really is an outstanding tool. It enables users to schedule social media at optimal times based on an analysis of your unique community. While you can manage more than one social network I tend to use it strictly for Twitter, and pay for the premium account which costs about $10 per month. I use it both for personal and professional Twitter accounts and have both integrated with Bitly for analysis. Buffer is one of those rare vendors that backs up their own talk with action: Buffer does a bang-up job on its blog.
2. Storify. Storify enables users to curate social media posts and published them in a blog-post style format — in essence to turn a bunch of social media posts into a story. It’s great for events, like trade shows, where the volume of social media posts can be overwhelming — Storify allows users to select a few meaningful posts to include in a story. It has all sorts of customization tools along the way. Though Storify has been around for a while, I’ve only recently started using it and found the interface very simple and easy to use.
3. Visual.ly. This is an online marketplace of sorts for graphical design — especially infographics. I’ve gotten to know Joe Cardillo a bit through his interaction on social media and keep meaning to give his service a try. If you’ve used Visual.ly, please share your experience in the comments.
One tool that’s not on this list is Livefyre, which I highly recommend as a comment system.
Here’s the complete infographic:
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