Productivity

  • The Best Productivity Tools for Social Media Marketers

    Are you still struggling to make the most of your time at work? Well, I’ve got a list of the productivity tools I use daily as a marketer, blogger, and business owner.

    Starting a work day is always hard if I don’t have any direction on what to do for that specific day.

    I’ve spent years trying a million different tools to help me and my team be more productive. These tools often annoyed us and did more harm to our productivity than good.

    But, finally I’ve found a handful of tools that I honestly could not live without.

    The good news is that most of these tools are free and are incredibly easy to get up and running.

    So no time wasted trying to figure out how these tools will help maximize your time — it’ll be obvious from the moment you log on.

    Intrigued?

    Todoist for Project & Task Management

    Without Todoist, my day doesn’t exist.

    After trying tons of other tools and apps, it is by far my project management tool of choice.

    The reason is that I’m very, very intentional about three things when it comes to work:

    1. My schedule – As a marketer and entrepreneur that is constantly trying to keep up with the fast-paced online world, I highly value my time.
    2. My projects – I always want to keep track of progress on my projects, whether if it’s for my own, my companies, or my clients.
    3. My delegated tasks – I am not a control freak, but as businessmen, we always want to track if our team is doing their tasks properly and in the right timeframe.

    Todoist lets me do all these easily. And with a beautiful, intuitive user interface that I love working in.

    I also save a lot of time by minimizing the steps I need to take in order to create, delegate, and confirm tasks.

    How? Well, Todoist has a natural language processing feature automatically schedules my posts based on what I write.

    Let’s say it’s November 12 and I write, “Draft blog post tomorrow.” This tool will automatically put it on my to-do list for November 13.

    You might think that this is a “meh” feature, but picture this: you want to delegate 100 tasks for you and your team that needs to be done tomorrow.

    Using other tools that don’t have this feature, you may have to type the task name, then multiple clicks to assign to a teammate, another few clicks to set the date, another click or two to add to the proper project, another click to “Save” and that maybe takes you 20 seconds each to do.

    20 seconds multiplied by 100 tasks is equal to 34 minutes of your time.

    With Todoist, this same task takes me 6.63 seconds.

    Yes, I timed myself.

    Well, my wife timed me.

    I created the task, gave it a date, assigned it to a project, and delegated it to a team member faster than she could finish rolling her eyes at what she was doing this for.

    Now, 6.63 seconds x 100 tasks = 11 minutes. That is equal to 23 minutes of my precious time saved.

    23 minutes of your time that you can use to do other things to grow your business!

    Also, not only does Todoist produce a great tool, but they also give real-world examples of how people use their apps — workflows and all.

    These are things that truly sold this tool to me.

    Price: Free. The paid version ($29/year) gives you task history, labeling, reminders, and a host of other options that is actually really good for its price.

    I have the business plan, and every new member of my staff is added to it on Day 1.

    Toggl for Time Tracking

    It only makes sense that since we’re talking about time and project management that I talk about my preferred time-tracking app, Toggl.

    You see, whenever my team works on a task for a specific client or project, we link up Toggl to the tasks set up in Todoist.

    Toggl’s has a Chrome extension that lets us connect it to Todoist. By using this, the synchronization happens automatically.

    This again conserves a lot of time for me and my team!

    Another– if not the most important– feature of Toggl is its Pomodoro mode.

    If you’re not familiar with the Pomodoro Technique, it’s this idea that you work in 25-minute sessions. You start by working intensely on one thing for 25 minutes.

    When those 25 minutes are up, you take a three to five-minute break.

    Then you start again. Do one session, take a break, do another session, take another break.

    In Pomodoro mode, Toggl times your sessions and gives you a little alarm that says, “Okay. Time to take a break.” It also times your breaks.

    And this mode has not only helped my productivity (staying focused because the timer is counting down) but also my health!

    Ever since I started implementing this method, I’ve said goodbye to eye fatigue, frequent headaches, and energy burnout. I have more energy at the end of the day and haven’t experienced eye fatigue ever since.

    So while it’s the perfect app for tracking and assigning time spent to things in Todoist tasks, it’s also pretty useful to make sure you’re taking care of your health.

    Price: I use the free plan. The paid versions (ranging from $9-$49/mo) have features tied to budgets, revenue, and profitability.

    Slack for Team Communications

    Another thing that’s super important for me as a business owner, and having a team, is communication. For this, Slack has been a life-saver.

    And I don’t know about you, but I hate E-mails. With a passion.

    In my businesses, we do all of our communication through Slack.

    Literally, no emails.

    Slack is a collaboration tool that allows you and your team to communicate in real time.

    You can either use it on your browser or download the app on either your desktop or mobile device. This means that you can check this tool whether you are at home, in the office, or on-the-go.

    I highly recommend the apps as it makes the experience so much easier.

    On Slack, you can set-up channels that will help you segregate all incoming messages into which topic the channel is about.

    The owner can easily assign people to specific channels for security purposes, and to keep the users glued into the topics they actually care about.

    All messages can be found in the respective channels which also has a search function.

    Which means one very important thing.

    I can check my company inbox once a week and I won’t miss anything — because all communications are in Slack.

    For my personal brand, I’ve created a separate private blogger community using Slack. It’s a paid community for professional bloggers who want to encourage and help one another grow.

    I find Slack a much easier platform to use for this function than a traditional online forum.

    Price: I still use the free version. The paid version (starting at $6.67/mo) gives you unlimited searches and app integrations in addition to more collaboration features.

    Typora for Beautiful Editorial Workflow

    Typora is another tool that helps me and my team achieve amazing results in a small amount of time.

    Some developers use Typora it for simple coding and keeping track of code snippets.

    I use it as a beautiful, simple, open source editor for writing blog posts and other long-form written content in Markdown.

    Uhh, Dustin, what is Markdown?

    Glad you asked!

    Markdown is a shorthand writing language which doesn’t involve heavy coding to create common text formatting. It actually uses plain text to produce the formatting.

    Remember those readme notepads on installers? And those formatting we use on old forums? Yep, they are using Markdown language.

    This allows people to do rich text formatting — bold, italics, monospace for example — even if they are using a plain text editor such as notepad.

    Although with Typora, the interface shows you how the text looks like even though you wrote in using Markdown language.

    Seems confusing?

    Here’s an example:

    Instead of retaining how I typed it, Typora shows it as how it’s supposed to look like to my audience.

    There are a lot of uses for Markdown, believe me, I am using Markdown and Typora way more than you’d think.

    All my email marketing campaigns are written with Typora. All my blog posts are written with Typora… even this one you’re reading right now! (I wrote about this also in my how to write a blog post).

    I write everything in Markdown before it goes to final editorial because it’s easier for me to edit that way. I can visually see the formatting to make sure it’s just right.

    If you’re a writer or a blogger and are currently using a complicated, slow buggy app — or perhaps you’re in the mood for something simple, try Typora.

    Price: Free while it’s still in beta.

    Agorapulse

    Social media is generally known as something that kills productivity.

    I should know. Those cat videos? Seriously man. You just go down the rabbit hole so fast once you start watching one!

    But for businesses and entrepreneurs, we shouldn’t really look at it this way.

    Social media sites are very powerful platforms that we should take advantage of. And there are actually tools for us social media marketers to make our experience using these platforms a breeze.

    We’ve covered my favorite blogging tool. Now let’s talk about what I use for social media management.

    When I was the Marketing Director at a prior agency, we had over 450 clients and were managing everything through Buffer.

    And Buffer was great for a while but it’s focused very much on publishing.

    What I really needed though was a tool to publish posts, monitor progress, and respond to engagements. At that time, I couldn’t find a tool that would let me do all of them at the same time–and stay within budget.

    And it wasn’t just me.

    At first, our Warfare Plugins community manager was monitoring, responding, and getting analytics natively. This means she was doing everything manually.

    Honestly, I can’t believe she didn’t quit!

    But now with Agorapulse, she easily creates content, responds to comments on multiple platforms, and downloads beautiful reports.

    Yes, you’ve read it right — multiple platforms.

    Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Google+, and YouTube. Agorapulse has support for all of these social media networks.

    This tool takes pride in itself by letting you do the following things easily:

    • Publish – it lets you customize the content that you can disseminate on all your social media accounts all the at the same time.
    • Engage – the tool lets you breeze through comments and conversation easily, letting you respond as soon as you can.
    • Listen – Agorapulse has a listening tab that is pre-populated, letting you in on trends you are following with one click.
    • Report – you can easily export all your social media stats at the same time, providing KPIs and giving you suggestions on how to improve your social media content strategy.
    • Collaborate – track all of your teammates working at the same time. Go and assign roles, delegate tasks, and check your team’s progress all on the same platform.

    As a blogger, I love the listening tab, especially because I can discover unlinked mentions. That means when somebody shares a link from our site but doesn’t tag or namechecks us, I know about it and can thank them appropriately.

    Before Agorapulse, I used to use a few separate tools to catch those mentions.

    Now I just log into Agorapulse and it’s all there for me in a gorgeous dashboard.

    I’m so glad Mike Allton introduced me to Agorapulse. It’s been a game-changer for myself and my businesses.

    Here’s an interview I did with Scott Ayres of Agorapulse discussing all of the tools I’m talking about in this article!

    Productivity Tools FTW!

    Although, you need to remember this:

    All these productivity tools are useless if you don’t have the perseverance and the will to be productive in your work.

    Tools are here to help us be productive. They are not the source of productivity.

    You are.

    Todoist, Toggl, Slack, Typora, and Agorapulse are amazing tools indeed, but it takes discipline to utilize them.

    Now that you know five of my secrets why I am productive, go on and try them yourself.

    [Featured Image by Lucky Business via Shutterstock.]

  • The Best Social Media Management Tools

    Need to make the most of your time on social media? These tools are the best of the best for social media management, planning, and posting.

    If you’re like most people trying to grow your personal brand or business on social media, you’ve got your work cut out for you. It’s likely you’ve got a Facebook page, Twitter profile, Instagram account, Pinterest account, Linked In profile, and (if you’re really savvy) a Google+ page and/or profile.

    And if you’re completely crazy, you may also be on YouTube, Periscope, Ello, Vimeo, and Snapchat.

    That’s a lot of social media to manage and create content for. How the heck can you possibly be effective with all of that?

    Well, the truth is most people are not effective with it. Mostly because they don’t have a strategy in place— but that’s another blog post altogether.

    I want to give you my insight on the best social media management tools to help you streamline your planning, scheduling, and posting.

    I’ve used dozens of social media management tools over the years, and there are plenty of lackluster, come-and-go tools that are just a waste of time and energy.

    This post is not going to waste your time on every tool available. I don’t find that kind of “all the things” post helpful, do you?

    Since there are many categories of social media apps and tools that accomplish a wide range of things like analysis, curation, artificial intelligence, and other super-cool jobs to help you do more with less effort, I’m going to narrow things down.

    I’m going to be limiting this post to the “Publishing” category of tools that help you with specific tasks such as:

    • Planning social media posts
    • Scheduling social media posts
    • Posting to social media accounts

    What I have below are the tools that not only get the job done but are going to be around for a long time to come.

    Agorapulse

    Until recently, Agorapulse was not even on my radar for tools to try out. It wasn’t until earlier this year at Social Media Marketing World that my good friend Mike Allton convinced me to give it a look.

    Holy crap.

    After only 30-seconds of using the web app, I was in love.

    Not only is the interface drop-dead gorgeous, but it also has almost everything I could want out of a social media management tool and more.

    And let me just say, as someone who lives inside digital apps and interfaces all day long, UI/UX is one of the biggest selling points for me. If I don’t love using and interacting with the interface, I won’t do it.

    SaaS companies should take that to heart.

    Agorapulse does far more than just scheduling and managing social media posts such as:

    • Viewing and replying to comments in an inbox for each profile
    • Monitoring search terms and mentions per profile
    • Social reports (that are gorgeous) per profile
    • Team members
    • Ability to assign items
    • Review workflows and rules
    • Ability to see profile information for users you’re interacting with
    • View top fans/followers with filtering options
    • Competitor monitoring

    It seriously does so much; I don’t think I’ve even tapped the surface yet of what it’s capable of.

    For the sake of this article, however, I’m going to stick strictly to the publishing, scheduling, and management of social media content.

    The social channels that Agorapulse currently supports are:

    • Facebook (Pages)
    • Twitter profiles
    • Google+ pages
    • Instagram profiles
    • LinkedIn (profiles and pages)
    • YouTube channels

    Now, notably missing from the list is one of my most important social channels, Pinterest.

    Although my Pinterest marketing strategy is essential to my blog, it was not a deal breaker for Agorapulse to have it (mostly because of Tailwind, which I’ll talk about later in this post).

    However, the Agorapulse team has assured me they are very close to releasing Pinterest support soon.

    Now, when it comes to scheduling and sharing content, you have a few options.

    Web App

    This is where I spend most of my time managing things in Agorapulse. As I said before, it’s a gorgeous interface that makes the work much easier.

    Simply click on the “Publish” button, and you’ll get a pop-up window in which you can select your profile(s) that you want to share to.

    Create your content in the middle section of the window which will then apply to all the social profiles you have selected.

    You can then customize each network’s message by clicking on its icon in the far-right box to customize your message for that platform.

    Once you’re done creating and customizing the content, you can then choose one of three options for posting it:

    1. Publish now: this would send your post straight to the social networks you’ve selected immediately.
    2. Add to queue: this would add your posts to the “Queue” you would have created in your settings for each profile (more on this later).
    3. Schedule: this allows you to pick a specific date and time in which you want this content shared.

    Once you’ve selected how you want to proceed, you can hit the “Next” button to get some final options based on what posting method you’ve chosen.

    No matter what posting option you choose, you will have the ability to tell the app to schedule these posts once or have them automatically scheduled multiple times. This is one of the most valuable features, IMO.

    Since I’m promoting a lot of my own blog posts, it’s valuable to me to be able to create the social media message once and have it automatically sent out regularly on a pre-determined schedule. Agorapulse makes that very easy and intuitive, also helping you to ensure it’s not shared too frequently.

    Browser Extension

    Now, when you’re surfing the internet (do people still say that?) sometimes you land on an article that you want to share right then and there, without having to jump to another browser tab.

    That’s where the Agorapulse browser extension comes in.

    Just one click gives you the same pop-up window as the web app where it will automatically copy/paste the URL of the article you’re reading. It will also copy/paste any text you’ve highlighted before clicking the extension icon.

    This makes sharing any web page fast and easy.

    Mobile App

    For those of you who are constantly on the run, and need to share things from your smartphone, AP has you covered.

    Other Noteworthy Features

    I could really dedicate an entire blog post just to Agorapulse, but for the sake of time, here are some of the other noteworthy features for publishing and scheduling content:

    • Visual Calendar: view all your published content (along with performance stats) as well as scheduled/queued content in one visual calendar.
    • Label your content: if you want to be able to categorize your content and see how each category performs, AP allows you to do this.
    • Tag other profiles/pages: when composing your content, AP has integration with Twitter and Facebook which allows you to properly (with autocomplete assistance) tag other profiles/pages when appropriate.

    With all that said, Agorapulse has now become my number-one tool for posting, scheduling, and analyzing my social media content. If you’re an agency, it’s an absolute must-have.

    Visit Agorapulse

    Pallyy

    If you’re aiming to elevate your social media management even further, Pallyy has got you covered. Pallyy offers a multitude of powerful features without drilling a hole in your pocket, making it a viable pick for growing brands and agencies.

    Pallyy stands out due to its simplicity, affordability, and its remarkable strength as a social media management tool. It’s a well-rounded one-stop-shop for everything social media-related.

    The first feature you’ll appreciate is Social Media Planning. This feature will enable you to plan your content months in advance. The multiple views provided by Pallyy, you can easily visualize how your content will appear once it’s ready.

    Their Social Media Scheduling feature is a major time-saver. The built-in tools offer an easy way to schedule across multiple social profiles and platforms, which makes creating and planning your social media content a breeze.

    Tracking and analyzing your performance is key to success in social media, and Pallyy’s Social Media Analytics feature delivers exactly that. They provide seamless analytics and the ability to create custom reports, helping you craft content that excites your audience.

    Interactions matter in social media, and Pallyy’s Social Media Inbox ensures you never miss a comment, DM, or mention. It’s essentially your social media version of Gmail, offering a comprehensive way to organize, reply, and manage all your conversations.

    When it comes to working with teams and clients, Pallyy shines in Team & Client Collaboration. They offer built-in workflows, approvals, and messaging functionalities that make teamwork smooth and efficient.

    Thousands of growing brands, businesses, and agencies depend on Pallyy daily to manage their social media content. Being a web-based solution, Pallyy is your go-to tool to manage your social media effortlessly yet powerfully.

    Feel free to learn more about what Pallyy has to offer and get started with a free version today.

    Buffer

    Buffer allows you schedule and share social media posts to your pages and profiles in the simplest way possible. The network channels it currently supports are:

    • Facebook (profiles, pages, and groups)
    • Google+ (profiles and pages)
    • LinkedIn (profiles and pages)
    • Twitter profiles
    • Pinterest profiles
    • Instagram profiles

    Not only do you get a wide range of social account options, but the user interface is beautiful. Next to Agorapulse, Buffer has the most beautiful user interface. It’s a bit more minimalistic than Agorapulse, but that mostly because there are fewer things it does.

    Using Buffer, you can schedule posts to your social networks one at a time or simultaneously. This is a big help for those of us managing multiple accounts and brands.

    Additionally, they have a browser extension that makes sharing any web page super easy.

    Nearly all of the tools listed in this article have browser extensions, but Buffer seems to have perfected the workflow and execution of theirs while the others seem to be a bit more cumbersome, especially if you’re managing multiple social media channels and want to customize your messages for each one.

    If you are a Buffer user and you’re not using the browser extension, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life. Get it!

    They also have great smartphone apps for both iOS and Android for scheduling on the go.

    On top of its powerful scheduling tools, Buffer also has some incredibly powerful analytics that will allow you to keep track of key social growth metrics.

    Additionally, Buffer gives you another feature called Content Inbox where you can add your favorite RSS feeds.

    This means that any time a new blog post is published to the feeds you are following, they will appear in this section for easy viewing and sharing to your Buffer queue.

    The last thing I’ll note about Buffer is that it also has collaborative capabilities. So, if you’re working with a team and have multiple team members working on the same account contributing content, you’ll love their team features.

    Buffer allows you to manage team members with specific roles: Content Contributor or Content Manager.

    The account Owner and Content Managers can publish posts at any time while the Content Contributor’s posts get added to a For Review tab where they need to be approved before getting added to the queue.

    Now, the downfall of Buffer as a full social media management solution is that they don’t have an “inbox” of where you can easily see all your notifications or brand mentions within the app.

    Buffer is simply a scheduling and analytics tool for social media managers.

    However, Buffer has recently gotten into the social inbox game with their new tool, Respond. Since it’s a separate app, I don’t find myself using it much as it’s one more thing to log into.

    As crazy as it sounds, I actually prefer doing my engagement and responding in the native social network interfaces.

    All around, Buffer allows you to perform the most arduous part of maintaining a consistent social presence across multiple accounts, networks, and brands—that is the scheduling of content. And it does so in the simplest way possible.

    Visit Buffer

    CoSchedule

    I’ve talked before about how great CoSchedule is as a content marketing calendar. I’ve even written extensively about why it is a non-negotiable tool for my editorial strategy.

    But even if you didn’t need it for this purpose, it also works as a fantastic social media management calendar!

    You can connect the same social channels as you can with Buffer but with the addition of one more (Tumblr):

    • Facebook (profiles, pages, and groups)
    • Twitter profiles
    • LinkedIn (profiles and pages)
    • Google+ pages (Powered by Buffer)
    • Pinterest profile
    • Instagram profile
    • Tumblr blog

    Now, why is adding a Tumblr blog such a big deal? Well, in case you weren’t aware, Tumblr is great for both social media marketing and SEO according to Moz! So adding it to your account is a definite must– even if you’re not putting a lot of time and energy into it.

    It’s also worth noting that if you are a Buffer user as well, you can connect your accounts so that scheduling in CoSchedule will add to your Buffer queues. For someone like me who likes to keep everything in one place as much as possible, this is super cool.

    Their user interface is also beautiful and lays everything out on a calendar interface so you can see the exact distribution of your posts.

    You can color-code your scheduled posts as well. This makes it possible to decide which colors represent certain types of content you are sharing so you can be sure you’re getting a good mix going.

    The big bonus here is that CoSchedule also connects to WordPress and if you’re using a tool to schedule your own content on social media, you have direct access to it right from within the app.

    And now with CoSchedules Social Templates and ReQueue features, you can bet that this may soon be the one social media management tool to rule them all—especially for those who have WordPress blogs.

    I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention briefly what those two features do.

    Social Templates allow you create a templated sharing schedule for all your social networks when you have a new piece of content to share. Using their Social Helpers, you can instantly populate an unlimited number of pre-scheduled messages with placeholders.

    ReQueue is basically the best thing that’s happened to my social media management in a long time. You can mark any post you share through CoSchedule to be added to your ReQueue and CoSchedule will automagically re-promote your best posts on a recurring basis, finding the best timing and spacing (to not be sharing the same things too frequently).

    This makes your evergreen content take on a life of its own.

    Visit CoSchedule

    Sprout Social

    When it comes to enterprise-level social media management, Sprout Social is a favorite. When you dive into the laundry list of features that are offered, you can quickly see why it is far more attractive to enterprises.

    The networks supported include:

    • Facebook (profiles and pages)
    • Google+ pages
    • Twitter profiles
    • Instagram profiles
    • LinkedIn (profiles and pages)

    What Sprout offers that the previous options do not is a central hub in which to manage both publishing and monitoring. You can also use sprout to respond to comments, which is a significant value-add for many teams who want everything in one place.

    The ability to assign tasks and collaborate inside of the Sprout Social dashboard really makes it the most comprehensive and easy-to-use tool for teams.

    Like CoSchedule, you also can see everything in a calendar view and tag social posts with specific categories. You can then easily see what your spread of messages and message categories are at a glance.

    When it comes to content curation, like Buffer’s Content Inbox, Sprout has an RSS integration that allows you to connect your Feedly account. This means if you’re utilizing Feedly as a content curation tool, you can now pull it right into your social media management dashboard and do it all from one place.

    Sprouts analytics tools are a big allure for many social media marketers because they’re beautifully designed and easy to export presentation-ready reports.

    Seriously, these reports are gorgeous.

    Their reports can also integrate with Google Analytics, making their reporting and analytics product second to none, in my humble opinion.

    The scope of what Sprout Social is capable of can be truly daunting. It does so much that your head will spin trying to take it all in.

    This is why I wouldn’t recommend Sprout for the newbie. However, if you’re a seasoned social media pro and you’re working with a team, it’s definitely worth looking into.

    Visit Sprout Social

    Friends+Me

    For the Google+ power users out there, there is no better social media posting tool than Friends+Me. The reason for this is because it was a tool built for Google+ first, with all other networks as the secondary.

    Unlike any other social sharing/management app, Friends+Me is the only tool on the market (that I’m aware of) that allows you to post to Google+ in every different way possible:

    • Profiles
    • Pages
    • Collections
    • Communities

    I’ve not seen any other tool able to post to Google+ Collections and Communities.

    If you’re a heavy Google+ user, there’s no better tool.

    It also can connect and post to other social networks:

    • Facebook (Profiles, Pages, Groups)
    • LinkedIn (Profiles, Pages)
    • Pinterest boards
    • Twitter
    • Tumblr

    Another feature that Friends+Me has that I haven’t seen in any other app is the ability to set up custom rerouting for your accounts.

    For example, if you wanted to just post to Google+ and have those posts automatically cross-posted to your other social accounts, you can set up rules and hashtag triggers to make that happen.

    I’ve had the pleasure of seeing this app from its early days and have seen the founder, Alois Belska, do amazing things with it. It’s super cool to see this indy app become such a powerhouse tool.

    Visit Friends+Me

    Hootsuite

    Although Hootsuite was one of the first big social media management tools on the market, it has not been a part of my workflow for years.

    While it covers a handful of important social media management tasks and desirable features, they’ve sorely lacked the ability to execute on a good user experience.

    As I mentioned above, if a user interface isn’t pleasant to use, I’m not going to use it. This is the biggest reason I’ve not interacted with Hootsuite in years.

    However, it continues to be a go-to tool for many professionals, and there’s good reason why.

    Like many other tools previously mentioned, it supports all the most crucial social channels:

    • Twitter profiles
    • Facebook (profiles, pages, and groups)
    • Google+ (profiles and pages)
    • LinkedIn (profiles, groups, and companies)
    • WordPress.com Blogs
    • Instagram profiles
    • YouTube channels

    Hootsuite allows two additional channels that none of the other tools thus far have included: WordPress.com blogs and YouTube channels.

    With Hootsuite the big draw is that it serves as both publishing tool and central hub for monitoring and replying to social mentions and comments.

    Their streams view allows you to create columns that feed in your social streams from different networks.

    For the people who love Hootsuite, the streams seem to be the primary reason for their use. You can create streams for things you want to monitor such as mentions, comments, your own posts, your scheduled posts, specific search terms on a given social network, and much more.

    Visit Hootsuite

    Specialty Social Media Management Tools

    I’ve categorized the following apps and tools under “Specialty” because they have a more limited focus or are limited in the social networks they can help manage.

    Tailwind

    If you have a strong emphasis on Pinterest (which I highly encourage) then you will want to add Tailwind to your social media toolbox. Their app is second to none when it comes to gaining insights as well as creating, curating, scheduling and posting content on Pinterest.

    They now support Instagram scheduling as well.

    But the real power in this tool is the ability to deliver high-level Pinterest analytics, pull in pins that others have posted from your domain, and perform actions based on these things.

    It really is a power-house Pinterest tool.

    Now, I will say that the user interface could use some serious work. But if you’re not overly sensitive (like I am) to UI, then you won’t even notice it because the utility it provides is overwhelmingly good.

    Additionally, they have a feature they call “Tribes” which are groups you can create or join with other Pinners who share things similar to you and you can share each other’s pins.

    This adds a layer of collaborative amplification that no other tool on this list has. It’s extremely valuable.

    Visit Tailwind

    Post Planner

    Now, Post Planner is probably the most unique of all the tools on this list. While it is limited to only being able to manage Twitter (profiles) and Facebook (profiles, pages, groups) the real value it adds is in the area of helping you find and post the best possible content.

    The folks at Post Planner have been digging through Facebook and Twitter’s most successful posts and creating a system for discovering and ranking content.

    They then give you the ability to take advantage of their data and share posts that have proven to generate the most traction.

    Like Buffer, you can create a schedule and add posts to your Plan (what Buffer calls a queue) and have them automatically go out according to that predetermined schedule.

    You can also create multiple plans and assign specific types of content–links, images, and text posts–to each plan.

    If content curation is a heavy emphasis for you and you would like some help in discovering the most popular/successful content to curate, Post Planner is definitely the tool you want in your arsenal.

    Visit PostPlanner

    TweetDeck

    If you like the idea of having multiple streams of social media messages all in one view but only for Twitter–TweetDeck is probably a good tool for you.

    This app is owned by Twitter and allows you to easily manage multiple Twitter accounts from one app. You can monitor and reply to mentions and messages as any of your connected profiles. You can also schedule posts to be tweeted at specific times.

    Personally, I like using TweetDeck for Twitter Chats because you can create a stream for the chat’s hashtag and have it right next to a stream of your @mentions to make sure you don’t miss out on anything important.

    Visit TweetDeck

    The Right (Social Media) Tool for the Job

    Social media management can be a difficult task. Having tools help, but having the right tools for the right job will make a world of difference.

    Hopefully, you’ve found a few here that will help you in your efforts to streamline your social media efforts.

    Which social media management tool is your favorite? Did I leave yours out? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

    Feature image via Twin Designs on Shutterstock.

  • The Best Investment I’ve Ever Made for My Blog: CoSchedule

    For planning and organizing your blog editorial calendar, CoSchedule might just be your new best friend.

    Your blog, in and of itself, is a major investment. The time you put into it, the passion that drives it, and the vulnerability of creating something and sharing it with the world are all huge investments.

    That takes guts.

    After a while, you start to get into a rhythm. You figure some things out. Maybe you even start gaining some real traction, and you think to yourself:

    Okay, it’s time to take this blogging thing to the next level.

    In 2015 I decided that I wanted to take my blogging to the next level. I wanted to get serious about being both consistent and strategic.

    Knowing that I am a visual person, I knew I needed something to help me with planning and executing my blog strategy.

    My requirements were simple. The ideal blog planning tool needed to:

    • Have a visual planner
    • Be simple enough to use effectively
    • Have a great user interface
    • Integrate with WordPress

    After taking a look at several solutions out there, I discovered CoSchedule.

    I was in love.

    CoSchedule’s marketing calendar gave me everything I was looking for and so much more. I’m convinced that there is no better planning, coordinating, and executing tool out there for bloggers.

    In this post, I’m going to dive deep into all the features that make it an essential part of my blogging process and why you should seriously give it a look.

    Visual Calendar

    First of all, I’m a highly visual person. When it comes to planning things out, I need to physically see it.

    If you’re the same way, you’ll love CoSchedule’s visual calendar interface.

    It gives you a full-screen layout of your month (or as many weeks as you want to show at a time).

    With the drag/drop interface, you can take unscheduled drafts from your content drawer and drop them onto your calendar when you want to publish them. As long as you’ve already connected your WordPress site, these drafts will be updated with the date and time that you’ve set in CoSchedule.

    You can also create new content from anywhere on the calendar. If you are creating a blog post, it actually creates the WordPress draft as well. Pretty convenient.

    This is now how I go about saving ideas for blog posts. If I’ve got a great idea, I add it to the calendar immediately and either put it right on the calendar, or drop it in my content drawer.

    Another little gem is the ability to color coordinate your posts. What I’ve done is assign each blog post category a color.

    This way, when I look at my calendar, I can instantly know which categories are getting the most attention and make sure I’m hitting all categories as frequently as I want.

    Wow, now doesn’t that look super organized?!

    More Than Just Blog Posts

    Smart bloggers know that they’re not just publishing blog posts–there’s a lot more that goes into running a successful blog. Things such as:

    • Newsletters
    • Social Media Promotion
    • Courses
    • Landing pages
    • Webinars
    • Podcasts

    And there are many more types of “content” you could be publishing as a blogger. Thankfully, CoSchedule allows you to plan them all. They currently have 20 different content types you can add to your calendar.

    Right now, I’m mostly just using the Blog Post, Newsletter, and Course types for my personal blog as well as the occasional Social Campaign for things that I want to promote using CoSchedule’s Social Templates (more on this later).

    Task templates

    Task templates make my editorial process so much smoother. Instead of having to reference my “Blog Post Checklist” (coming soon) and “wing it” when it comes to executing the post in time, I have just set up a task template.

    My primary task template includes what things need to be in the blog post, and what timeline they all need to be done in.

    Blog post necessities:

    • Headline Score Green (using the Headline Analyzer)
    • 2 external links (to relevant authoritative articles)
    • 2 internal links (for SEO and user experience)
    • 2 click-to-tweet quotes (powered by Social Warfare)
    • 3 Pinterest images
    • 1 animated GIF

    Time-sensitive Tasks:

    • Finish Draft (3 days before Publish)
    • Move Draft to WordPress (3 days before Publish)
    • Proofread (1 day before Publish)
    • Finish and upload images (1 day before Publish)
    • Schedule shares (1 day before Publish)
    • Google+ Community share (3 days after Publish)
    • Evaluate for ReQueue (30 days after Publish)

    Your process may not be as elaborate. For me, this level of discipline is needed to keep me on track. You can customize your own Task Templates however you want.

    And that’s the real beauty! Your workflow, the way you want it.

    Social templates

    I’ve actually written all about how amazing Social Templates are in my previous post and the CoSchedule blog. If you aren’t familiar with the concept yet, simply put:

    Social Templates allow you to create a social media promotion schedule that you only need to plan once, but apply to every blog post you publish thereafter.

    You probably have a routine when it comes to promoting your blog posts once they’re published. Maybe you go and manually share them all to your social networks or maybe you use Buffer to do so.

    Imagine how long that takes. Every. Single. Time.

    Well, Social Templates allow you to schedule that routine once and with the addition of Text Helpers, Image Helpers, and even Video Helpers you can create placeholders in each social message that you can populate quickly and easily one time.

    Here’s a video of me using my own Social Templates:

    (Video coming soon– Subscribe on YouTube in the meantime.)

    These have literally saved me hundreds of hours of work per year since they released them.

    Can you see why they alone are worth the price of admission?

    ReQueue

    If Social Templates have saved me hundreds of hours, ReQueue has saved me thousands of hours that I wouldn’t have even considered working in the first place.

    What ReQueue does is allow you to decide which posts to repromote (ideally your evergreen posts, and then put them on a repromotion schedule completely on auto-pilot.

    There’s a reason I agreed to be the “poster child” of their ReQueue landing page:

    I freaking love this feature.

    All you need to do is select which of your social posts you want to add to be repromoted and CoSchedule will intelligently decide when is the best time to share them based on frequency and ideal time of day.

    You can set up your ideal reposting frequency on the settings page.

    You can also create multiple different groups, each with their own frequency settings.

    I have yet to find an automated system for evergreen posts that works this well and is this simple to set up.

    All the Social Media Things

    I haven’t yet talked about the ability to connect your social accounts and use CoSchedule as the central hub for all your social sharing. Just like scheduling your blog posts, you can schedule social media posts.

    I also covered this in my previous post about Social Media Management Tools. But for the sake of this post, here are the social networks you can connect through CoSchedule:

    • Facebook (profiles, pages, and groups)
    • Twitter profiles
    • LinkedIn (profiles and pages)
    • Google+ pages (Powered by Buffer)
    • Pinterest profiles
    • Instagram profiles
    • Tumblr blogs

    In my humble opinion, this is all you need and more.

    They’ve also just recently announced that you can now target specific audiences with your Facebook posts when using CoSchedule! This is a real game-changer in the Social Media Scheduling space.

    This is something I’m really looking to try out for our Warfare Plugins calendar.

    Awesome Referral Program to Lower Your Cost

    So if you’re like me and you save money whenever or wherever you can, you’ll also love CoSchedule’s referral program.

    When you sign up for an account you’re given a Referral Link which you can share out. Each time someone clicks on your link and ends up signing up for a paid CoSchedule account of their own, you get 10% off your monthly (or yearly) bill.

    That means if you were to get 10 paid referrals, you’d get your plan 100% paid for!

    They also have the option for you to write a review on your own blog and you can submit it to them for an instant (and lifetime) 50% discount!

    Yes, that’s one reason I’m writing this post. But I would have written it anyway because I blog about the tools and apps I use frequently, and CoSchedule is one of the tools I simply cannot live without.

    With a 14-day free trial, there’s literally no risk to giving it a try.

    There’s Really No Better Investment for My Blog

    The amount of time that the Social Templates and ReQueue save me is worth the price alone. There are services out there that perform similar services with far less ease that cost more.

    The fact that CoSchedule also allows me to visualize, plan and execute on my blogging as well as any other related marketing efforts (like newsletters) is icing on the cake.

    No, screw that… that’s icing on a cake that is on top of another cake, which also has icing on it.

    So if you’re a serious blogger who wants to make your life easier, more effective, and more efficient, give CoSchedule a try.

  • How to Promote an Epic Blog Post for 30 Days in 5min

    A quick and simple template for creating 30 days worth of social media posts in 5 minutes or less!

    Let’s say you’ve just finished up a blog post and it’s a masterpiece. You’ve spent hours crafting it, ensuring that it’s a work of pure brilliance. You’ve carefully crafted your content in a way that people are just going to eat it up and ask for seconds.

    Finally, you get to hit that beautiful “Publish” button. Feels good.

    But now what? Oh, that’s right–now you have to get that wonderful piece of blog post goodness out in front of people. How do you do that?

    Well, social media, of course.

    But then you realize, “Oh, shoot. Now I have to spend the next 20+ minutes promoting this post across every social network I’m on.” And that kinda feels like:

    Let’s face it, promoting your blog posts across all your social networks isn’t the most fun part of blogging. In fact, it can become pretty tedious and boring work if you’ve been doing it for a while.

    But what if I told you it didn’t have to be that way?

    What if I told you that you could implement a simple social media promotion template that would cut down your time into a mere fraction of what it would normally take you?

    Well I’m here to show you exactly how I have mastered the process of promoting my blog posts on social media with maximum effectiveness and minimum effort.

    When I publish a blog post, I spend roughly 5 minutes scheduling out 30 days worth of social media shares across 7 different social networks.

    And just to be clear, I’m not just sharing out the headline of my article and a link to it. I’m scheduling out 33 different messages over the course of 30 days to 5 social profiles.

    How do I do that?

    Simple. I’ve created a template, and I use the heck out of it.

    And then I made it even easier by creating Social Remix. It’s a free app that any blogger, podcaster, YouTuber, or long-form content creator can use to turn one piece of content into 30+ social media posts.

    Try Social Remix for free!

    But for those of you who like a more manual approach, keep reading.

    Social Media Blog Promotion Template

    For every blog post I write, I create a unique set of messages by filling in each of the following fields, which I call “Text Helpers”:

    [Title]
    [Lead]
    [Summary]
    [Quote]
    [Question]
    [Tweet]
    [CTA]
    [#hashtag1]
    [#hashtag2]

    As soon as a blog post is finished, I fill out each one of these text helpers for the post. Here’s a closer look at what I put in each of them:

    Title: This is pretty obvious–just the title of the article. Always keep this 70 characters or less.

    Lead: The lead is what I call the brief introduction that I put at the very beginning of every blog post. It serves as a sort of “hook” or a “why you should read this” intro to the post. Its purpose is to make it very clear, in 1-2 sentences why the reader needs to read the article. Keep this to 110 characters or less and make sure you’ve mentioned your primary keyword once.

    Summary: This is a longer 2-3 sentence summation of the post. What are they going to get from it without giving it away entirely? You will want to make sure you have all your keywords hit in this element. No character limit, but it shouldn’t be too long.

    Quote: Use the best quote from the article or turn one of your best points in the article into a quote. Keep it to 110 characters or less. If your quote is from an influencer, be sure to use their Twitter handle in the quote.

    Question: Your article should be the answer to some question or problem that your audience is facing. Formulate that question and use it here, in 110 characters or less.

    Tweet: A message that will be exclusively for Twitter–optimize it for the Twitter audience to get the most clicks (add hashtags inline with the text). Again, 110 characters or less.

    CTA: This is simply the link to your article.

    Hashtags: You should have at least one good hashtag that goes along with your article. You only need 2 maximum.

    For example, here’s what I filled out for one of my recent articles:

    [Title] = The Biggest Social Media Mistake (And How to Avoid It)

    [Lead] = As the recent fate of Vine shows us, you should never put your audience solely in someone else’s hands.

    [Summary] = Are you working to build an audience online? If so, I want to warn you about a very serious social media mistake that I see a lot of social media stars making.

    [Quote] = “Anyone who says you don’t need a website to develop a successful online presence is a short-sighted idiot.”

    [Question] = Are you in danger of making the BIGGEST Social Media mistake?

    [Tweet] = Don’t make the BIGGEST #SocialMedia mistake like so many others.

    [CTA] = https://dustinstout.com/the-biggest-social-media-mistake-and-how-to-avoid-it/

    [#hashtag1] = #SocialMedia

    [#hashtag2] = #marketing

    Once I’ve filled these out, I can start copying and then pasting them into my scheduled social messages. Next, I’ll show you how I break it down for each network.

    Facebook Combinations

    For Facebook, I use 3 posts as well, but with a different combination of helpers.

    Post 1: Link post format.

    [Lead] [CTA]

    Post 2: Image post format.

    [Question] [CTA]

    Post 3: Image post format.

    [Quote] [CTA]
    
    [Summary] [CTA]

    Twitter Combinations

    If you’re familiar with how Twitter works, you’ll know it has a much higher posting volume tolerance, so I schedule out at least 5 different tweets for the 4-week span. All of these tweets, except for the first one, has an image uploaded with it.

    Post 1:

    [Tweet] [CTA]

    Post 2:

    [Question] [CTA]

    Post 3:

    [Lead] [CTA]

    Post 4:

    [Quote] [CTA]

    Post 5:

    [Title] [CTA]

    I’ll then repeat a few of those over the course of a month since it’s likely that all my followers aren’t seeing all my tweets.

    Pinterest Combinations

    For Pinterest, I always have at least 2 or 3 different Pinterest optimized images to use, so I’ll just create a Pin for each one using the [Summary]. I then try to post them to 4 different, relevant boards (making a total of 8-12 different pins).

    LinkedIn Combinations

    For LinkedIn, I basically use the same posts as I use for Twitter, but without the image upload. All LinkedIn posts are just link post format for me.

    Instagram Post

    I only promote once on Instagram and I use the custom tweet. I may add a few extra hashtags, but that’s about it.

    Tumblr Combinations

    For Tumblr, I pretty much just treat it like Facebook.

    There’s great SEO value in Tumblr, however, I can’t say whether or not I’ve reaped the benefits of it just yet. Since it’s no extra work for me, I add it in anyways.

    What about Visuals?

    If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you probably know how crucially important visuals are in any digital marketing strategy.

    So it’s worth noting that part of my blog writing process includes creating 5 different promotional images. I use the following sizes:

    • 1920×1080 – for my blog header
    • 1080×1920 – for Pinterest and Stories (2 different versions)
    • 1920×1920 – for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram
    • 1200×628 – for Open Graph (for any social network that displays an article preview when sharing a link)

    And I know what you’re thinking… that’s going to take a LOT of work! Even if you’re using something like Canva or SoVisual.co to create images quickly, having to create 5 different images is time consuming!

    All that in less than 5min?!

    Yes. The reason this only takes me 5min is because I use Social Remix. It’s an app I created that utilized the exact templates I outlined above!

    All you need to do is:

    1. Sign-up for a free account
    2. Start a New Campaign by pasting a link to your blog post
    3. Social Remix will pull in your Title, Description, Author Name, and Feature Image, you just fill in the rest
    4. Pick a visual theme for the images
    5. Click the “Generate” button and let the magic happen

    Filling out the campaign fields should take you 60 seconds or less.

    Once you’ve hit the “Generate” button and the app will instantly remix all of the information into sharable posts for the following social networks:

    • Facebook (5 posts)
    • LinkedIn (5 posts)
    • Twitter (15 posts)
    • Instagram (3 posts)
    • Pinterest (5 posts)

    It will also create 16 images based on the visual theme you chose. They are sized to fit every possible platform.

    All you have to do is copy and paste the messages into your scheduling tool of choice and you’re good to go.

    Give Social Remix a Try!

    As a bonus, you can also download a .csv file of all the posts. For those of you who use a scheduling app that allows for bulk upload, this is super handy. Agorapulse—my social media scheduling tool of choice—has this feature, so I always use the Download feature.

    More Time Saved = More Time Engaged

    Being able to instantly generate 30 days worth of promotion for my blog post has been a total game-changer for my productivity. It’s almost impossible to count how many hours I’ve saved by using this one feature alone.

    The less time I have to spend writing and scheduling social media posts, the more time I can spend engaging with my community.

    This is why I highly recommend every serious blogger give Agorapulse a try.

    Otherwise, just go out and crush your content promotion with the help of Social Remix! I’d love to hear how you end up using it.

    P.S. If you’re looking for a more exhaustive checklist on blog post promotion, my friend Mike Allton has written an excellent piece (complete with a checklist) which he calls Blog Promotology and it’s the most comprehensive guide I’ve seen.

  • Don’t Just Boost Social Media Engagement, Scale It

    Widen your gaze: It’s not just about optimizing your posts for highest engagement, that doesn’t scale. I’m going to show you what does.

    There are approximately 43,235,901 blog posts written about “how to get more engagement on social media” (rough estimate). Some good. Most bad.

    The good ones will give you solid tactics for optimizing how you share things on your social channels so that they are most likely to get more engagement (comments, “likes”, shares, and the most important, click-throughs).

    So for the sake of time, Let’s zoom through some of the most common top tips for boosting your social media engagement.

    And then, I want to take the conversation a step further and show you simple ways to take boosting to the next level– scaling your engagement!

    How to Get More Engagement on Social Media

    Some of the most common tips to increase your social media engagement include the following:

    • Use visuals: Visual content has significantly higher engagement rate than standard text or even link posts.
    • Ask for the share: Just like in sales, if you ask for the share, you may just get it. Some studies show a significant increase in engagement when you actually ask for it.
    • Social Proof: Having social validation already on display helps people to decide whether or not something is trustworthy or credible.
    • Mention people: By using social network @mentions allows you to grab someone’s attention by sending them a notification. Kind of like saying, “Hey, I’m talking about you over here,” or, “Hey, I quoted you over here!” You’re guaranteed at least to get their attention and hopefully they’ll want to help you spread the word as well.
    • Use hashtags: For places like Twitter and Instagram, hashtags are a critical discovery mechanism to allow similar conversations to be discovered. Add yours and you will potentially get in front of a much larger audience.
    • Ask Questions: Asking questions gives people a directed way to engage. This way they have to do much less cognitive work to come up with something to say, because you’ve given them a clear direction in how you want them to engage.

    There are plenty more ways to get engagement, and most of those tips require you to know the culture of each social network. Understand these things, and you’ll already begin to break away from your competition.

    Here are a few great articles that I highly recommend for further reading into this subject:

    These are all must-know social media tips and practices. But this is not the end of your learning curve. Don’t stop at simply boosting your engagement!

    Let’s Talk About Scaling Your Efforts

    Great, you know how to get more engagement for the content you post on social media. Whoopty-doo! Good for you!

    These best practices, tactics and strategies are only step one. So I want to take the conversation one step further. I want to show you how to scale those best practices, tactics, and strategies.

    But first, what does “scale” mean in this context?

    Definition of Scale In the Strategic Sense

    In business, you hear phrases like “does the business scale,” or “are we operating at scale,” or “will this scale up?”

    In this context, the idea of scale refers to this:

    the ability to grow without being hampered by structure or available resources. (Investopedia)

    For a more real-life scenario, Josh Lowery uses this perfect analogy:

    To illustrate: In Year 1, company delivers $10M in revenue with $1M in operating costs. In Year 2, company delivers $12M in revenue with $1M in operating costs. Company scales because it grew revenue by $2M without increasing its operating costs.

    When you’re trying to grow a blog or website, your personal social media engagement rate is a result of your effort. But if that’s as far as you ever think about your content promotion, your highest potential engagement for your content will always depend on your direct effort. That’s tedious. And doesn’t scale.

    What you need is to have the people sharing your content to take into account these best practices, tactics and strategies. But you can’t control this, of course…

    Or can you?

    Here’s how you need to think to take your content promotion game to the next level:

    How can you leverage your well-crafted social shares and allow your audience to share on that same level?

    Can you follow that? Let me simplify just to be sure:

    “How can I get the people sharing my content to get better engagement and click-throughs when they share my content?”

    Well, now that’s tricky. But it’s one of the exact problems we set out to solve with our WordPress social sharing plugin, Social Warfare. And in my highly biased opinion, we did a pretty darn good job.

    The tools we’ve added to Social Warfare are specifically geared to allow you to have control over how your content is shared so you can be sure (as sure as you can be) that it’s shared the way you want it to be shared.

    However, if you’re not a Social Warfare user, or maybe you’re not even on WordPress, here’s a few tactics you can steal from us to get your content shared the way you want it.

    1. Click-to-Tweet Quotes

    Having an in-post social call-to-action is extremely helpful in getting people to tweet your blog posts. You can use ClickToTweet.com to create your own tweetable links and place them inside your article.

    Simply follow the instructions and then add the click-to-tweet link in your blog post following the quote that you want people to tweet. Using the words “Tweet this quote” helps people instantly know what action you want them to take.

    So in this tactic, you’re crafting the tweet for optimal engagement and allowing your readers to share that exact tweet in a single click.

    Powerful stuff. And many people have already caught on to how powerful click-to-tweets are.

    Bonus tip: If you’re tweet is a quote of someone, don’t forget to @mention the person you’re quoting in the tweet. This ensures that every time that quote is tweeted it get’s them a shoutout, and gets their attention to possibly help you spread your reach further.

    This is a great example of why you should also be using influential people’s quotes in your content. Give them a reason to want to help you share to their audience.

    Why does this scale? Because you’re creating an easy way for people to share exactly what you want them to share, optimized for engagement. Instead of just you tweeting these things in an optimized way, you’re making sure others can do the same.

    2. Pinterest Optimization Secrets

    Pin this!

    Believe me– if you make your blog posts as Pinterest-friendly as you can, it can open up a floodgate of traffic to your site. I’m not talking one-off traffic either. I’m talking long-term, sustained traffic.

    Tall Images

    You can create tall images for your articles and place them in your blog posts. It will work okay.

    But typically tall images don’t look great when placed inside a blog post– the user experience is hindered. So instead, you can use the following snippet of code to hide the image from sight so that it’s just picked up when someone hits the Pinterest button.

    <div style="display:none;"><img src="IMAGEURL" alt="DESCRIPTIONHERE" /></div>

    Simply replace the IMAGEURL with the image URL and the DESCRIPTIONHERE with the description you want to show up on Pinterest. The image will be hidden from the page but show when your visitors hit your Pin button.

    Why does this scale? Because you want readers to have a Pinterest optimized image to select without ruining the layout of your blog posts. By having this hidden image pop up when they go to pin the article, they can share the optimized image and get more engagement on it when they pin it.

    Rich Pins

    No, unfortunately this has nothing to do with how much money your pins have in the bank.

    When someone pins your webpages, you want Pinterest to be able to format the pins in a way that give you the best possible presentation– rich pins are the way to go. They allow for extra information to be extracted and shown on pins made from your website.

    In an article for the Warfare Plugins blog we outline everything you need to know about Rich Pins, as well as the other rich social snippets that your website should be capable of. I’ll link you to that in another section of this post.

    You will need to follow Pinterest’s Rich Pin Guidelines to get them to work, but they’re well worth the effort.

    Why does this scale? Again, when you give people the optimized thing to share, they get more engagement and you benefit from the traffic and social signals it generates.

    The Perfect Pin

    Here’s where things get really tricky– but could make a world of difference. If you choose to go this route, you may only want to do it for your most important blog posts.

    Constructing the perfect pin means you need to have both a great (tall) visual and an optimized Pinterest description.

    What is an optimized description? Think of it this way: People are using Pinterest to search for things. In order to get your things found by these searchers, your description has to include what they’re looking for. So take a Pinterest engineers advice and optimize your pin descriptions for search.

    Now, here’s where it gets tricky. It is possible to create a “Pin it” button that, when clicked by your readers, will generate a Pin with exactly the image you want them to pin and exactly the description you want them to have with it.

    In other words, you give them exactly the right image and exactly the right description.

    Essentially you just need to create a link that follows this formula:

    https://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=YOURURL&media=LINKTOIMAGE&description=YOURDESCRIPTION

    You would simply need to replace the words in ALL CAPS with the appropriate piece.

    • YOURURL = the URL of the page being linked to
    • LINKTOIMAGE = the link to the image file you want pinned
    • YOURDESCRIPTION = the description for the pin

    But it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. All of those elements need to be HTML encoded. What does that mean? Without getting too jargony– it’s a way of formatting special characters in HTML. So what you’ll need to do is get your three elements (link, image source and description) and use an HTML encoder to encode them before placing them inside your Pinterest pin link.

    So as an example, I’ve created the following link for this post, demonstrating exactly what it will look like for users when you paste in the link:

    Custom Pin Link

    Now here’s what the actual HTML of the link looks like:

    https://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdustinstout.com%2Fboost-social-engagement%2F&media=http%3A%2F%2Fdustinstout.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F06%2Foptimize-your-pins-735x1498.jpg&description=It%E2%80%99s%20not%20just%20about%20optimizing%20your%20posts%20for%20highest%20engagement%2C%20that%20doesn%27t%20scale.%20This%20post%20shows%20you%20how%20to%20get%20the%20exponential%20growth%20you%27re%20looking%20for.%20via%20%40DustinWStout

    Does your head hurt yet? Yea– mine too.

    So, suffice to say this is a lot of work. But if you don’t want to do this work (or you don’t have a plugin like Social Warfare that does this for you) then you have one more way to optimize.

    Why does this scale? Because now, instead of hoping they choose the right image to pin and the right description, you’re giving them only the best option and all they need to do is click the button (or link) and pick a board. They get more engagement and click-throughs, and your content benefits.

    Optimize Image Alt Tags & Descriptions

    Make sure your image alt tags and descriptions are filled in. See my article on Creating Optimized Images for a full breakdown of this process.

    Pinterest will scan for these alt tags and description fields on images and automatically populate one of them for the Pin description. My best advice though is to utilize the alt tag first and foremost, but stick within the guidelines I mention in the above-listed image optimization post.

    I’m spending a lot of time on this Pinterest section because the traffic potential from Pinterest is huge. I know first-hand.

    Why does this scale? When people are pinning your content with the proper descriptions and keywords, they are more discoverable in Pinterest search. This means you have all those people growing your Pinterest search discoverability.

    3. Customize Social Open Graph

    I know this has been a pretty complicated post already, so I’ll save you on this one. In a nutshell, you can use WordPress plugins (such as Yoast SEO or Social Warfare) to customize the information that social networks display when your link is shared on them.

    On the Warfare Plugins blog we have a full article dedicated to understanding Open Graph, Twitter Cards and Rich Pins which I highly recommend.

    Why does this scale? Because when someone shares your content with optimized Open Graph image, title and description, it looks more attractive and will get more engagement for them.

    4. Finally, Share Links to Your Social Posts

    Take this post for example. Scroll to the bottom and find the very last quote. You’ll notice I have a “Pin this Quote” button beneath it. This is simply a link to a pin I’ve pinned on Pinterest. A simple call to action allowing people to repin my quote.

    Simple, highly effective.

    You can do this same thing with any social post– just grab the link to the social post, give it to people and ask them to reshare it. You can find the link for most social network posts by clicking on the timestamp.

    If your website theme is coded to easily place buttons wherever you want (an easy customization to make) all the better. You can see examples of how I’ve done that on my Style Guide page.

    This cross-promotes one network to another, leveraging your audience reach across platforms.

    And if you don’t have the ability to easily code buttons with links to your social posts, you can always just embed social posts right into your blog. The following social networks all allow for grabbing an embed code for your social posts:

    • Facebook
    • Google+
    • Twitter
    • Instagram

    Simply find the additional menu options icon on any of your social posts and they will likely reveal an option to grab the embed code for that social post.

    Here’s what that looks like for a Facebook post:

    Tweets are easy to embed if you’re using WordPress, just paste the link to the Tweet and it automatically generates the embedded tweet:

    And how about an Instagram embed:

     

    A post shared by Dustin W. Stout (@dustinwstout) on


    Why does this scale? With embedded posts you’re allowing your engagement to go beyond the confines of the social network walled gardens.

    Wrapping This Thing Up

    The above tactics and strategies will help you take your social media engagement from manual effort to scale. Instead of doing all the work and automation yourself, you will have an army of readers who will do it for you.

    When the people sharing your content get more engagement and click-throughs, you benefit exponentially. That’s how you scale your efforts.

    That is where the real power of social media is at.

    And when your readers understand the effort you invest to make their lives easier and that sharing your optimized content gets them more engagement, they will bookmark you as one of their go-to content sources.

    Now, in the comments below tell me what tactic you’re going to try first, or which one is your favorite.

  • How to Get More Traffic Without More Writing (Think Evergreen)

    Do you have an Evergreen content strategy? Here’s why you should have one, and how to start.

    If you’ve been blogging for six months or six years, you should have an Evergreen Content Strategy. This type of blog content can drive traffic and conversions for years to come, allowing you to write less frequently but continue to grow your audience.

    For those of you who might not know what I’m talking about, here’s a brief explanation of what Evergreen content is:

    An Evergreen post is a blog post in which the content has long-term value that won’t diminish with time.

    The idea is that the content will retain its value and usefulness for years to come.

    Let me tell you how powerful this can be by using my own blog as a prime example:

    41% of my traffic over the last year came from only 5 blog posts.

    Taking it a step further and factoring in all of my evergreen posts, they account for around 55% of the total traffic driven to dustinstout.com in the last 365 days. And they’re all well over a year old.

    I’ve recently updated a few of them so the publish dates have changed, but they were all created in 2014 or before.

    Great Evergreen blog posts allow you to write less and continue to grow your site traffic, subscribers, leads and conversions.

    What Makes an Evergreen Post?

    There are many different types of evergreen posts, which we’ll get to in a minute. But you need to understand that there are some common traits that you want to keep in mind in order to squeeze the most out of them.

    Make sure it’s sustainable

    A perfect piece of evergreen content contains timeless information or assets that can be updated as needed. Generally speaking, you want to create something that doesn’t require much maintenance.

    Sustainability means that a year or two (or three) from now someone can stumble across this post and still find value in it.

    That means anything that is time-sensitive is no good. Also, anything that is changing rapidly (more than once or twice per year) is probably not a good subject. You don’t want to have to be updating the information too frequently to where you’re sick of it.

    Think sustainability.

    Visual elements are crucial

    Visual Evergreen Content Quote
    Pin this quote

    One of the keys to creating content that is shareable is making sure you have great visuals. Visual content is shared more frequently, engaged with more and carries a longer shelf life than standard text content.

    With Google+ and Pinterest being primed visual platforms for long-term discoverability (more on this soon) it’s always good to create visuals that will grab eyeballs.

    Be sure you also optimize your images for highest potential SEO benefits. Many people skip this step, and that’s where you can really win out over the competition.

    Narrow, beginner-level topic

    You want your topic to be laser-focused. By keeping your topic narrow you ensure that it meets a very specific need for your target audience.

    On top of that, you want to ensure your topic is targeted at the beginners. Why? Because those are the types of people searching for the types of posts you’ll be creating.

    Experts aren’t likely looking for your content if they’re already an expert in it (unless they’re looking for support for their own articles). There’s also a higher volume of beginners than there are experts at any given time.

    Aim to create content that is helpful at the entry-level.

    Give it some depth

    We’re not talking a quick 300-500 word article here. Your evergreen posts need to be meaty— I’m talking 1,500-2,000+ words.

    With Google favoring blog posts that are more than 2,000+ words and their recent Panda update penalizing “thin” content, this is just a good blogging strategy in general. But it’s all the more important for an evergreen piece.

    You want to have something that people can really dig their teeth into— something they couldn’t possibly retain in one sitting. This will increase it’s likelihood of being shared and bookmarked so they can return to it later.

    Types of Evergreen Posts

    There are many different types of posts that make great evergreen content. Some great examples would be:

    If you need more ideas, there is a fantastic list of Evergreen Content ideas from the Buffer team that I highly recommend. Or this piece on 17 little-known affiliate programs.

    Once the Post is Finished

    Once your epic post is finished there are a few things you’ll want to do. You don’t have to do all of these, but they’ll definitely help.

    Promote the snot out of it

    I’m sure you already know how to share your blog post on social media. That’s a given.

    But you’ll want to take it a step further and promote it like your life depended on it. If you’ve done your job— this is going to be a highly useful piece of content and odds are you know people who will benefit from it.

    Share your post directly with the people you think will appreciate it most. Tell them you were thinking of them when you created for it (if that’s true of course). Let them know you’d be honored if they read it and if they find it useful you’d love it if they shared it.

    Direct email is not dead people. Don’t be afraid to email your personal contacts if you know it’s something they’d find interesting or helpful.

    If you’ve done your job well, then it should get a decent amount of traction right away. It doesn’t have to be a viral hit but it should be getting above average shares, comments and traffic.

    Showcase it on your blog

    Do you have a spot on your blog where you highlight certain “best” or “most popular” posts? You should.

    On this blog, I have a section on my homepage that shows my top 3 most popular blog posts. Additionally I have a second section titled “Free Social Media Resources” that is also a place for my evergreen posts.

    Your About page is also a great place to feature some of your best/favorite content.

    Popular posts widgets are also a great way to showcase your best content. Since your evergreen content should be amongst the most popular, having a Popular posts plugin would be very helpful.

    (Popular posts is one of the many features of Social Warfare, FYI.)

    Reshare regularly

    Once the initial buzz for the article is over, be sure to continue adding it into your social share schedule regularly– at least twice a month.

    Remember that social media moves rapidly. Just because you shared something once doesn’t mean that everyone in your audience has seen it.

    If you have a content calendar, be sure you work your evergreen posts in regularly.

    Another idea I recently discovered is to create an evergreen queue in Buffer. Read point number 2 in Kevan’s post. This will allow you to keep ready-to-go social posts for streamlined recurring sharing.

    Repurpose the snot out of it

    One way you can keep the momentum coming, or add some more fuel to the fire is to repurpose your content in different formats.

    Hopefully, you’ve already included some visual elements as I previously stated— that’s crucial. But maybe you can take it a step further and create some alternative media formats to increase the content’s reach.

    Some great repurposing ideas could include:

    • Turn it into a Slide Share presentation
    • Make a YouTube video out of it
    • Do a Blab about it
    • Create a SoundCloud version
    • Republish it on Medium

    Always be sure that when you repurpose or republish your content outside of your blog you always create a call to action and link back to the original piece. That’s where you control the environment and that’s where you can continue to refine and update it.

    Link to it as much as you can

    You will want to continue to link to this post whenever appropriate in newer blog posts. You can even go back and find your older posts that keep getting traffic and add links to this post.

    The more you link to that evergreen content, the more authority you build for it in the eyes of search engines and the more opportunity you give people to discover it.

    Keep Them Updated

    Every six months or so you’ll want to revisit and update the post to keep it as relevant or valuable as possible.

    The investment on these evergreen posts can be heavy at the beginning, but they can be well worth their weight in gold. Plus, updating them is usually easy since most of the work is done, and can help when you don’t have the time to create a brand new post.

    One Last Thing

    Once you’ve created these evergreen posts don’t make the same mistake I did and miss out thousands of potential email subscribers. In my follow-up post I share how I boosted my email opt-ins by 400% in a single day with one simple strategy.

    Have you created an evergreen post before? Want me to take a look and offer feedback?

  • The Best Tools to Create Amazing Visual Content

    Creating visual content that grabs people by the eyeballs doesn’t require a degree in design as long as you have the right tools.

    You need to create great visuals in order to hook your audience by their eyeballs and draw them into your content. Their brains will connect with your image 60,000 times faster than your brilliantly crafted headline.

    So how can you create these beautiful, eyeball grabbing images without spending a fortune? Well I’ve come up with a small list of the best desktop tools to create visual content.

    This is part of my Essential Guide to Sharing Images Online series. Be sure to catch the rest of the series as well!

    All of the following apps have been tested to the max by myself and some of my audience, clients and friends. If an app or software did not make it into this mix it’s either because it did not pass my quality standards or I flat out wasn’t able to research it. 

    The Best Online Apps

    The apps in this category are web apps. This means that you can only access them through your internet browser and cannot be accessed offline.

    SoVisual.co

    For the fastest, easiest, and most non-designer-friendly way to create stunning social media graphics, look no further than SoVisual.co.

    This free web app focuses on simplicity and speed. With a huge (and growing) library of more than 1,000+ social media templates, your work is cut out for you. On top of that, each template you customize is automagically sized for every platform. Some other automagical features include:

    • Auto-sized text (so you never have to tinker with sizing toggles)
    • Auto-colored to your brand settings
    • Auto-cropped and auto-positioning for uploaded photos
    • Auto-inserts brand logos, social handles, names, and website links

    SoVisual.co also does one thing better than any other app out there. With most design apps, what you have is an overwhelming amount of individually crafted templates. Which is great in that you have a lot of variety. However, when you’re creating a brand on social media, you want your designs to look consistent and coordinated, right?

    The designers at SoVisual.co are focused on creating “Collections” of designs. These highly-coordinated sets of designs allow you to create a consistent brand style that sets you apart from the rest of the disjointed social media designs. This builds brand recognition and gives off a much more professional impression.

    If you’re looking for a faster, easier way to crank out some quick social media graphics, SoVisual.co is your new best friend.

    Creating a beautiful graphic is as easy as filling out a form.

    No need to tinker with resizing text, repositioning elements, or sorting through a thousand different buttons, levers, and toggles.

    Pick a template, type your text, hit “Create.”

    And as the creator of SoVisual.co, I’m obviously biased. But it’s honestly the app I have been wishing someone had created sooner.

    Because lots of times you just don’t need a full suite of graphic design tools to get a job done. Sometimes you just want to create a quick quote graphic. Or maybe turn a tweet into an image.

    You don’t need to bring out your entire toolbox when a hammer will suffice. That’s what SoVisual.co is among all these other great visual content tools.

    Canva

    At this point, Canva is a household name. It is easy to use, has a boat load of professional grade templates and is loved by many.

    Canva greets you with a number of options for your canvas based on what you are going to create. From a general social media image to a Podcast cover, presentation, blog graphic, social media covers, and more.

    This really makes it easy to get started quickly without having to memorize lots of image sizes. (Then again, you really only need these three image sizes.)

    Once you pick your canvas size, it’s off to the editor where you can add color effects, text, crop, and add all sorts of things to create the perfect visual.

    You can use all of Canva’s features completely free of charge. There is also a large database of free stock images and designer templates that you can use in your designs. However, some of the design templates and stock imagery have a price.

    Once you’re finished, Canva then makes it easy to save to your computer or share it straight out to Twitter or Facebook.

    Crello

    Vista Create is a very popular and simple graphics editor. It has a comfortable and simple interface, a large library of ready-made templates for advertising and promotional materials.

    Another advantage of this design tool is the possibility to create animated images. With a collection of over 30,000 free templates, 29 different print and web-based image formats, 10,000 vectors and over 60 million images you can create anything from social media posts to posters.

    Creating content with Crello is a lot of fun and would be a piece of cake to everyone.

    PicMonkey

    screenshot of picmonkey.com

    PicMonkey is very similar to Canva in that it’s free to use, has a large number of templates, images, and graphic design features that are either free or paid. The difference is PicMonkey offers a monthly subscription plan to unlock the premium features whereas you only pay for each premium item you want with Canva.

    I’ve also found that the user interface is a bit clunkier with PicMonkey and it took me longer to get used to than Canva. This may be due to my personal style though, so do give it a try and see if the workflow vibes with you.

    Once you’re done with your image on PicMonkey, you also have the ability to share it to your social networks (more options that Canva), which is quite convenient.

    Photoshop Express

    screenshot of photoshop express website

    Adobe, in all their generosity, have made a free version of Photoshop available to all called Photoshop Express. In it you have many of the professional grade features that professional graphic designers use on a daily basis.

    In all honesty, most people could get by using only this software for basic graphic design and visual content creation. Although it doesn’t offer a lot of the power that the full version of Photoshop has (such as working with layers), it’s still quite powerful.

    What makes it different from Canva and PicMonkey is that it doesn’t have any sort of marketplace where you have access to designer templates and stock images. You will have to find all that on your own and upload it into Photoshop Express.

    Pixlr Editor

    screenshot of Pixlr website

    Pixlr Editor is very much like Photoshop Express but far less features and a tad more clunky on the user interface. However I have been told that it’s pretty intuitive if you’ve never worked with Photoshop before.

    What it definitely has over the previous options is that it’s the first (and only) web app that allows you to work with layers in a similar fashion as with Photoshop. This comes in handy when you are working with a lot of different elements and want to select one of them quickly without disturbing the other elements.

    If you find yourself working with a lot of elements, Pixlr Express is probably the way to go for you. (It’s also has a mobile app.)

    Best Desktop Apps

    These apps are available for download so that you can use them offline.

    Gimp

    Gimp is probably one of the oldest free graphic design softwares out there. It is very similar to Photoshop and for anyone who has experience with Photoshop, it’s a rather easy transition.

    Gimp works with pretty much any operating system and has a wide variety of features. It’s also got extensive documentation and guides. Being that it’s been around for a while also means that there’s probably more than enough tutorials and tips written about it to help you shorten your learning curve.

    Paint.net

    Although I’m not too fond of Paint.Net myself (it feels like it was built in 1990 and never got updated), many people have found it’s minimal toolset and ease of use to be very helpful.

    You’re able to work with a variety of image formats and has a similar feel and function to  Pixlr Editor and Gimp. I know of a few people who do graphic design work professionally that use it on a regular basis.

    The Best Paid Apps

    Now if you want to get a professional grade editing software and don’t mid paying a small premium (compared to Photoshop), my two recommendations are Sketch and Pixelmator (Mac only).

    Pixelmator

    If you’re wanting to get into serious graphic design power and don’t want to spend more than $30, boy are you in luck! Pixelmator packs a ton of power for a very small price. There’s not much that you can’t do with Pixelmator.

    It also has a companion iPad app that could come in handy if you create visual content on the go.

    Sketch

    Sketch is gaining a lot of ground with web designers and user interface designers. It has a very powerful set of features for designing complex projects. It is all vector based and employs cutting edge workflow to make the process of designing super efficient.

    Go Grab Some Eyeballs!

    Now it’s time for you to go test out some of these tools and see which one fits. Not everyone will take to the same types of workflows or features. Find the one that works for you and use it regularly.

    The more comfortable you get with the tools you use, the better your visual content will get.

    Are there any apps or software you would add to the list? Have a question about how to use a specific piece?

  • 7 of the Best Mobile Apps to Create Visual Content

    Creating visual content on mobile can be fast and easy with the right apps.

    Visual content is a powerful way to share a message that catches people’s eye. But you don’t always have access to a desktop computer when inspiration strikes.

    Whether you just want to share a great quote you just heard, or you want your photos to look like they were shot by a pro, I’ve put together this list of the best mobile apps to create visual content.

    This is part of the Essential Guide to Sharing Images Online. Don’t forget to catch all the posts in the series!

    The Apps

    There are tons of apps out there that will allow you to create visual content. I’ve focused this article on only the best of the best because the last thing you need is a list of 101 mobile apps that all do the same exact thing.

    Since I only own Apple products three of the apps listed are iOS only. I’ve done the work though to find those apps that are on Android as well and I’m sure you can find alternatives if need be.

    SoVisual.co (New)

    For those of us creating social media content daily, this is the fastest and easiest way to create beautiful social media graphics. Creating a graphic is as simple as filling out a form.

    The “no-fluff” approach to creating quick graphics doesn’t even require you to sign-up or login if you don’t want to. Use the search / filter or just scroll through and find the template you want. Fill out the text fields, upload images (if necessary) and click “Create.”

    The app also generates multiple sizes for each graphic, so you don’t have to waste time resizing, cropping, or reworking fore each platform.

    This is definitely and app for the efficiency nerds who hate spending too much time tinkering with complex graphic design tools.

    Price: Free (Paid options)
    Platforms: Mobile-friendly Web app

    VSCOcam

    By far my favorite app for taking and editing photos. The camera allows you to select separate focus and exposure spots– which is really helpful when you have a tricky lighting when trying to shoot.

    But the best part about the app is it’s professional grade filters. Their photo filters put every other app to shame (sorry Snapseed). It also allows you to go in and fine tune the images with a number of adjustment tools.

    Nearly every single photo I take goes through VSCOcam.

    Price: FREE
    Platforms: iOS + Android

    Phonto

    A fairly extensive set of editing tools. It’s both easy to use and quick without a whole lot of fuss. Despite having a wide variety of options the user interface is not difficult to navigate and get to the things you really need.

    The thing I love most about it is the wide variety of fonts available. Some of the other apps on this list have a very limited amount of available fonts without upgrading to a paid version.

    Price: FREE
    Platforms: iOS + Android

    Pixlr

    This app probably has the most comprehensive set of tools and features. Text, filters, effects, overlays, themes, clip art… lots and lots of stuff. You can even choose the resolution at which the final image is saved. Very handy for situations where you want to limit the image size.

    So if you’re looking for the widest variety of options, this is the app you want.

    It’s greatest strength though is also it’s greatest weakness in that it’s overly complex. I have only found myself going back to this app a handful of times when I really needed some in-depth customizations.

    Price: FREE
    Platforms: iOS + Android

    Over / GoDaddy Studio

    One of the oldest apps I’ve used, Over is now owned by GoDaddy. Like Canva, this app provides a giant library of customizable templates with dozens of bells and whistles to assist you in making every piece exactly what you want it to be.

    The big difference for this app is the ability to create a “Social Site” from within the app.

    Price: FREE
    Platforms: iOS + Android

    Mextures

    Add some serious drama to your images with professional grade overlays, light leaks and gradients using this app. You can also combine effects and create formulas that you can use over and over again to create a consistent style.

    The app also features collaborative editing and sharing of formulas which can be a lot of fun if you want to have multiple people contribute to your creations.

    Price: $1.99
    iOS

    Hyperlapse

    Instagram’s newest app that allows you to create time-lapse videos. Now, it’s unfortunate that this app came out only a few weeks before iOS 8, which adds this feature into the native camera app. However, the Hyperlapse app adds a level of control that the native iOS function does not— the ability to adjust the speed of the time-lapse after you capture it.

    These can make for an interesting variant to just a plain old video.

    Price: FREE
    Platforms: iOS + Android

    Sponsored: Desygner is a graphic design tool for non-designers that helps simplify content creation on your phone, tablet or laptop.

    Last word

    When sorting through all these apps, you’ll want to find the ones that work best for you. Not every app will work best for you and how you approach creating visual content.

    My best advice is find a few that you like the best and stick with them. Develop a style that is consistent and that people will begin to expect from you. When you develop a style that you and your audience loves, your brand will become all the more recognizable, distinguishable, and powerful.

    Any apps you would add to the list? You can leave a comment by clicking here