Monday, September 30, 2013

Custom Printed Valve Stem Caps For Bikes, Cars, Trucks, & Motorcycles

Our Alloy Valve Stem Cap features a full color poly-dome and replaces the ugly black cap that comes with your bicycle.  It also works for trucks, cars, and motorcycles.  This valve cap can be used as a fundraising item for charity events, high school sports booster clubs, or sold in school stores.  Custom Printed Chrome Valve Caps are perfect for birthday parties, family reunions, company picnics, and kids' graduations.


Click HERE to see a quick demo!



In case you missed it, check out Custom Imprinted Safety LED Lights for PETS!

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Meaningful Work = Meaningful Life

Photo Courtesy: Amy Gizienski via Flickr
What is it that most working people want today?  Meaningful Work That Brings Personal Freedom.  In other words, the ability to have a job that not only brings income to cover all the bills (and some enjoyment too), but also provides a sense of purpose and fulfillment in the process.

Whatever the path you have chosen, whether through formal education or through the school of hard knocks, you probably did not intentionally set out to be in a career that promises to keep you trapped in a job you hate, suck the life out of you, and constantly reinforce feelings of hopelessness and meaninglessness.

The economic climate has affected everyone, intimidating all of us to live in fear and therefore, not really live how we want.  Many of us have believed the lie that the American Dream is just a great slogan from the past.  

When I stumbled on The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living. Do What You Love, and Create a New Future, I couldn't help but feel excited.  The title alone gives the reader hope that this is not all there is, that not only can we think outside the box, but we can actually live out our entrepreneurial dreams in a tangible way.

Author Chris Guillebeau states his premise in this way:  
The vital career question of what is risky and what is safe has changed permanently.  The old choice was to work at a job or take a big risk going out on your own.  The new reality is that working at a job may be the far riskier choice.  Instead, take the safe road and go out on your own.
What if you could achieve your own life of freedom by bypassing everything you thought was a prerequisite?  Instead of borrowing money, you just start--right now--without a lot of money.  Instead of hiring employees, you begin a project by yourself, based on your personal combination of passion and skill.  Instead of going to business school (which doesn't actually train people to operate a small business), you save the $60,000 in tuition and learn as you go.
Remember, this book isn't about founding a big Internet startup, and it isn't about opening a traditional business by putting on a suit and begging for money at a bank.  Instead, it's the account of people who found a way to live their dreams and make a good living from something they cared deeply about.  What if their success could be replicated? 
Too many of us have become trapped in the idea that the only way to lead a life of fulfillment is to follow the path of "safety." We must learn to trust ourselves, to pursue that what we have always dreamed about.  


What is holding us back....REALLY? 

In case you missed it, check out How Smart People TACKLE FAILURE Head On!

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

27 Creative Ways To Use INSTAGRAM to Market YOUR Brand!

What IS all the hype about Instagram?  While some people are using this savvy little app for their own personal enjoyment, there is a whole new world which has opened up for those using it to enhance the creative presentation of their business products and services.

The beauty of Instagram is that you can take pictures or even video, and then choose from a variety of "filters" to give the desired effect or mood that you are trying to convey.

Social Media Examiner writer Debbie Hemley gives this amazingly thorough post, with 26 TIPS on how to creatively give your brand visibility to new markets!


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26 Tips for Using Instagram for Business


social media how toAre you wondering how to use images and short video to enhance your customers’ experience?
Have you considered creating a brand profile on Instagram to make your brand visible to a new market?
Getting started on Instagram is fairly straightforward.
Simply sign up for an account (e.g., use the same name as your Twitter handle), add a profile photo (e.g., brand logo) and a link to your website, connect your account to Facebook and let your followers know they can follow you there.
It’s what to do next that presents a difficulty for many brands.
What follows are 26 tips and brand examples, an A-Z guide, for capitalizing on a business presence on Instagram.

#1: Acquaint Yourself With How to Use Instagram for Business

Businesses have been flocking to Instagram in droves. In response, Instagram started the Instagram for Business blog, which offers tips, brand spotlights, API examples and news from Instagram HQ.
instagram blog
Instagram's blog will help keep you in the know.
Check it out and add it to your reader to keep up to date on some of the coolest ways to use the Instagram platform for business.

#2: Balance Fun Images With Pictures From Your Business

Rachel Sprung writes, “Take advantage of the increased real estate you have with the Instagram web page to tell a story with the images. Have a healthy balance of fun images and business pictures.”
Anthropologie has struck a good balance with their images. Their followers like fun images as well as business ones. A puppy picture received 7,640 likes and a picture of their personal shoppers posing at a company luncheon event received 3,457.
engaging post with puppy
One of the ten most engaging posts mentioning #Anthropologie.
Track the engagement on your images to find out what your followers like best!

#3: Cultivate a Following

Tim Sae Koo offers 3 helpful tips for getting more followers on Instagram:
  • Connect your Facebook account
  • Use relevant, popular hashtags
  • Engage by following others and liking their photos
Cross-post selected images to your Facebook page with a hashtag that aligns with your campaign or brand image to help people who don’t know you’re on Instagram to find you there.

#4: Debut Videos

Instagram’s recent Video on Instagram has given Twitter’s Vine a serious competitor to contend with. Most notably 15-second, filter-enabled, editable video functionality compared to Vine’s 6.5 seconds.
Jordan Crook charts the differences between Instagram and Vine in the image below:
instagram vs vine chart
Jordan Crook charts Instagram vs. Vine.
Honda debuted an Instagram video by making a joke out of the choice. Fun idea!

#5: Embed Instagram Video in Your Blog or Website

Last month, Instagram released a new embed feature for its desktop web browser version. Mike Gingerich provides helpful instructions, in addition to examples for when and how to use Instagram videos.
Since you never know who will see your shares on a social networking platform,embed your Instagram video in your blog or website to extend the reach of your content.

#6: Follow Your Followers Back

The people you follow on social networking platforms make all the difference in the world. Curiously, many brands on Instagram (some with very large followings) don’t follow back.
To create strategic relationships on Instagram, find the brands and people you enjoy and can learn from in your followers and follow them back. We’ll talk more about this in #23.

#7: Generate a Flexible Posting Plan

Carley Keenan offers the following advice on the frequency of sharing on Instagram:
“You don’t need to post on Instagram every day. The ‘feed speed’ on Instagram is still mostly laid back. If you start posting a lot, you might saturate your followers’ feeds, and you don’t want to force yourself into the noise too often. Decide what you have ready to post and create a schedule to help you remember what to post when and to track what is working once you get going.”

#8: Harness the Power of Apps

Kay Tan put together a list of 20 apps that will enhance your photo-sharing experiences. There are apps that let users print images, search tags and keywords, subscribe to Instagram profiles via email, download all Instagram photos in a single archive folder, plus many more.
Use these apps to make Instagram a significant part of your social media marketing strategy.

#9: Inspire Potential Customers

Anna Colibri suggests you post photos that are relevant to your brand and potential customers.
Whole Foods Market posts representative photos to promote healthy, wholesome food products, store events, sustainability and their active community of customers and employees.
whole foods market
Whole Foods Market's photos are relevant to their brand.
Attract your target market with images that share a compelling and inspiring story.

#10: Juxtapose Use of Filter Types and No-Filter Images

Instagram provides a number of filters to change the look and feel of your photos.
A study conducted by Simply Measured earlier this year found 59 percent of the world’s top brands are now active on Instagram.
Their findings also shed light on choices around filtered photos: “Lo-fi is the filter of choice for 14 percent of brands’ filtered photos, followed by Valencia with 12 percent,Rise with 12 percent, Amaro with 11 percent, Hudson with 9 percent, Sierra with 9 percent, X-Pro II with 8 percent and Hefe with 7 percent.”
favorite filters
Simply Measured Favorite Filters: The Most Engaging and the Most Used.
Marketo also suggests that filters are more than a question of aesthetics, they can say a lot about you!
Shake things up a little every now and then, and try out a new filter or go the no-filter route.

#11: Kickstart Instagram Efforts With a Change in Perspective

Russ Meyer recommends that for brands to be successful on Instagram, they need to get past their inherent interest in selling and instead:
  • Share a distinctive view of the world
  • Cultivate a unique visual sense
  • Capture things that are interesting to the brand and to the core target customer
  • Train your eye to focus on what makes a great, provocative, engaging image
Entrust your Instagram presence to someone in the organization who understands how to align images with the interests of your target customer.

#12: Leverage Photo Contests on Instagram With Facebook

Businesses can host photo contests on Instagram using hashtags to organize submissions and an RSS feed to follow along with new photos as they’re added.
Samsung Camera used the hashtag #LiveInTheMoment to successfully promote their Instagram photo contest on their Facebook page.
samsung photo contest
Over 17,000 fans saw the status update and 336 commented on it.
Use Facebook status updates to encourage your fans to enter your Instagram photo contest.

#13: Market Your Brand Using Trends

Remember when Twitter’s #followfriday seemed somewhat avant-garde? Instagrammers can use a number of trending hashtags to join in a bigger part of the visual community storytelling.
Charles Mazzini takes us through the days of the week beginning with #ManCrushMonday and ending with #SelfieSunday.
way back wednesday on statigram
#WayBackWednesday viewed on Statigram.
Find a trending hashtag that’s relevant to your marketing strategy andparticipate with images from your brand.

#14: Network on Instagram

Kim Garst writes, “Instagram connects people through photos” and suggests 3 essential ways to create a network:
  • Engage—like others’ photos and leave comments
  • Follow your already established followers from other social media platforms
  • Include your hashtags—if your brand uses specific hashtags on Twitter or Google+, use them on Instagram as well

#15: Optimize Your Profile

Instagram profiles—like their counterparts on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms—need to include brand information in specific ways (e.g., maximum number of characters, specific image sizes, attention to branding).
Brandon Gaille has a helpful list of what to include in your profile and Gerry Moranprovides an easy-to-digest graphic illustrating where everything shows.
instagram profile
Gerry Moran shows how to build the perfect Instagram profile.
Complete your profile with all of the information customers might need to find you and do business with you.

#16: Promote Your Business on Both Facebook and Instagram

Great things can happen when a platform is purchased by an entity such as Facebook. Instagram and Facebook as a duo offer brands a unique opportunity for promotion.
James Borow explains, “Brands create Instagram videos, share them to their Facebook pages and then boost them into paid media that hits the Facebook news feed, in the same way that they boost text or photo posts. This enables brands to reach Facebook’s 818 million monthly active mobile users, which dwarfs Instagram’s 130 million. It’s profiting from Instagram without having to advertise on Instagram… For now it’s all about capturing and sharing the world’s moments—and paying to distribute them on the world’s largest social network.”
Capitalize on Facebook’s integration of Instagram to reach a wider audience.

#17: Quantify and Qualify

Want to know how your brand is doing on Instagram? There are image analytics tools such as BlitzMetrics and Curalate that will provide detailed insights.
Tim Peterson writes, “Curalate is able to track an Instagram post’s likes and comments so that a brand can see how that popularity translates into added followers, but also capitalize on the popularity. Denim brand 7 For All Mankind used the platform to identify that an image was resonating on Instagram. It then pushed that out as a Facebook ad, resulting in the brand’s most engaged ad on that platform to date….”
Use image analytics to identify images and video that resonate with your fans and followers.

#18: Reward Followers

Collins Paris describes how American Express “offers its followers backstage entries to events such as fashion shows, concerts and even the U.S. Open.”
He recommends that retail brands reward their followers with discount codes and promos.
american express
Follow American Express for insta-access to exclusive experiences, news and rewards through our lens.
Deliver perks to your followers so they will make viewing your feed content a priority.

#19: Showcase Photos of Employees

Showing your employees at work not only gives a behind-the-scenes view of your company, it’s also a way to celebrate staff and show them how much they’re valued. A great example is Beaucoup Bakery, which shares pictures of their staff with the hashtag #beaucrew.
member of beaucoup bakery
A member of #beaucrew at Beaucoup Bakery.
Acknowledge staff members’ skill sets, successes and milestones on Instagram.

#20: Treat Followers to a Visual Experience

Sharpie shows followers how their product can be used to “start something” creative. The majority of their photos in their feed show drawings in a myriad of colors.
sharpie
Grab a Sharpie and start something.
Find a creative way to showcase the use of your company’s products and services.

#21: Use Industry-Related Hashtags

If you’re at an event or location that’s designated by a hashtag (something like #smmw13), Jenn Herman recommends you add it to your photos so that event coordinators and other attendees can find them.
engaging photos mentioned
10 most engaging photos mentioning #smmw13.
Track the relevance of your Instagram hashtags with Nitrogram, the Instagram analytics and engagement platform that provides key metrics on hashtags including contributors, content, engagement and context.

#22: Video Important Brand Moments

Tom Edwards suggests that “Brands can share unique branded experiences, highlight brand advocates, co-create content with audiences, preview products, highlight a specific cause, extend the brand’s persona via video, preview upcoming events by adding visual context, share important news, drive promotional awareness, leverage Instagram video for promotion and create videos that show fan appreciation.”
Capture your company’s important moments in 15-second videos and share them with your followers so they feel included.

#23: Widen Your Exposure to Other Brands

As we covered in #6, it’s good practice to follow other brands on Instagram.Statigram is a great tool for finding brands and hashtags that relate to your brand. Simply enter the brand name or hashtag into the search box and click Search.
In this example, I wanted to see if Target had a profile on Instagram. They do!
search on statigram
Search for businesses and industry-related keywords on Statigram.
Use this tool to find, follow and research your competitors on Instagram.

#24: eXpose Something New

ABC World News often shares a photo about a broadcast they’ll be doing later in the day.
abc interview
ABC News shared hours earlier that Robin Roberts would be interviewing Venus Williams.
Use Instagram to give your followers a first look at or sneak preview of an event, a product or news feature.

#25: Yuck it Up

Donna Amos writes, “While running a business requires dedication, sweat and sometimes tears, it should never be all work and no play. Instagram is perfect for displaying fun times in the office or when you’re out and about having lunch or dinner with coworkers. Sharing these types of images with followers speaks volumes. It not only suggests that you don’t take life too seriously while on the job, but instead you must be happy and successful in your career.”
All work and no play will make your brand a dull company on Instagram. Integrate images that show your human side to create stronger connections with your followers.

#26: Zap Between Instagrammers’ Images and Edit for a Longer Film

Lexususa had a cutting-edge vision with their #LexusInstafilm using 212 instagrammers’ images to edit together a 3:44 Instagram video to showcase the 2014 Lexus IS.

@Lexususa a brand who knows how to zap it to their audience.
As one instagrammer says in the video, the Lexusinstafilm is a great example of what Instagram is, “A community that comes together.”
Transform crowdsourced images into a unique video message that features and highlights the creativity of your loyal followers.
Over to You
These are just a few tips on how you can use Instagram to create a presence for your business. Check them out and see what works best to enhance your brand.
What do you think? Are you inspired to try Instagram in your social media strategy? Do you see a tip that will make a difference in your marketing? Please leave your comments below.

Avatar of
ABOUT THE AUTHORDebbie Hemley
Debbie Hemley is a freelance writer and social media coach. She helps businesses develop and maintain social media content strategies. Follow her on Twitter @dhemley & FacebookOther posts by  »

Monday, September 9, 2013

How Smart People Tackle FAILURE Head On!


Photo: Courtesy of Chris Griffith via Flickr
Best-selling author John C. Maxwell, invites us to take a look at a topic that makes most people cringe.  Whether reflecting on a mistake made 10 years ago or 10 minutes ago, Maxwell makes argument for not allowing our failures to cause us to cower in fear and regret; rather, he encourages people to embrace the reality of our mistakes so that we can move forward and use them to our benefit.  He even goes a step further by evaluating what contributes to a person's level of success.  

Below is an excerpt from his book, Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes Into Stepping Stones For Success, where he examines the common misconceptions about the reasons or factors having contributed toward people's successes.  In turn, we can fall into the trap of minimizing others' success when we focus on a particular factor that we believe led them down that much envied road, instead of paying careful attention to what Maxwell calls "perception."  
WHAT'S THE ROOT OF ACHIEVEMENT?
What makes the difference?  Why do some people achieve so much?  Is it...
    •  Family background?  Having a good family growing up is something to be grateful for, but it's not a reliable indicator of achievement.  High percentages of successful people come from broken homes.
    • Wealth?  No, some of the greatest achievers come from households of average to below-average means.  Wealth is no indicator of high achievement, and poverty is no guarantee of low achievement.
    • Opportunity?  You know, opportunity is a peculiar thing.  Two people with similar gifts, talents, and resources can look at a situation, and one person will see tremendous opportunity while the other sees nothing.  Opportunity is in the eye of the beholder.
    • High morals?  I wish that were the key, but it's not.  I've known people with high integrity who achieve little.  And I've known scoundrels who are high producers.  Haven't you?
    • The absence of hardship?  For every achiever who has avoided tragedy, there's a Helen Keller who overcame extreme disabilities or a Viktor Frankl who survived absolute horrors.  So that's not it either.
Photo: Courtesy of Amazon.com
No, none of these things are the key.  When it comes right down to it, I know of only one factor that separates those who consistently shine from those who don't:  The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.  Nothing else has the same kind of impact on people's ability to achieve and to accomplish whatever their minds and hearts desire. 
In the world of entrepreneurial articles and business books alike, there seems to be a common thread with regard to success and achievement:  Perception.  How can such a seemingly insignificant word carry such great weight in how it affects the outcome of our lives?  The interesting part is that it is entirely in our control, how we choose to perceive the situations we face on a daily basis:  do we look at them as opportunities or misfortunes?  

Is there a failure in your business or personal life, which you need to change your perception about? 

In case you missed it, check out The 4-Hour Work Week...SERIOUSLY?!

Thursday, September 5, 2013

14 OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD Social Media Marketing Apps!

Photo Courtesy: Wikipedia
When It Comes To Social Media  Marketing, Do You Sometimes Feel Like You're From Another Planet?

There is no need to feel overwhelmed, especially with amazing social media marketing pros, who take pride in spending their time researching the tools that will be most beneficial to your online marketing experience.

Just yesterday, September 4th, Social Media Examiner posted another helpful list of 14 Gadgets you will want to read up on, to see which ones are the best fit for your online presence and needs. There are so many things I appreciate about this site, namely their plethora of social media marketing gurus, whose ultimate goal is to provide you with invaluable information...for FREE!  They have already done the time-consuming work of scoping out the top apps, add-ins, and plugins that will only enhance your social media experience.  In addition, they keep the information concise and relevant, knowing that your time is valuable.

In the article below, you will find that these are the very tools they are using themselves, and what they find specifically useful about them.

Where else can you find the real inside scoop, than from those on the front lines of the ever changing social media market?

Enjoy.

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Are you looking for social media tools to get more out of your marketing?
Are you wondering what tools marketing pros are using successfully?
We asked fourteen well-known marketers to share the latest social media tools they’ve been using.
Discover how you can use these tools to help you to get more out of your social media marketing.

#1: Mention

Todd Wheatland
Todd Wheatland
Mention was developed as a user-friendly replacement for Google Alerts. They’re a textbook example of how to build a platform by doing one thing better than anyone else.
As well as being an absolute joy to use, it captures so many more, ahem, ‘mentions’ online than any other platform I’ve used that it’s become my #1 go-to social mention reference tool.
There are many clever things behind the way Mention is set up. They’ve taken the Apple approach to clean and simple UI to give you great functionality as a default and the power to modify settings to really hone in on what’s important to your circumstances.
mention set up
Mention provides clean and simple functionality.
Apart from doing a fantastic job of identifying online mentions, some of my favorite features are:
  • Simple controls to turn specific sources off—but still be able to monitor them in the spam folder in case you mis-classify something.
  • Default alert emails that take you straight to source, rather than forcing an extra step by taking you to the Mention platform.
    mention todd wheatland
    You can see how many online mentions you have in the left-hand column.
Of course, with success, they’re quickly adding features—including an enterprise-level offering—that will make them seem increasingly like a lot of the more established players in the social tools space. So far though, they’ve done a great job of maintaining simplicity and delivering on their core offering.
Todd Wheatland, head of thought leadership at Kelly Services.

#2: Addvocate

jay baer
Jay Baer
My favorite new social media tool is Addvocate. I like it so much, I invested in the company and joined their board.
Addvocate solves a very common problem in social media, which is the need to decentralize your messengers. Almost always, the employees in your company have more social connections (combined) than the company does for its official social media outposts.
Thus, smart companies need to find ways to ask employees to occasionally share relevant information on their personal accountsAmber Naslund and I wrote about this in The NOW Revolution, and recommended a “message of the day” email that is sent to all social media–active employees.
Addvocate takes that concept and makes it much, much better. Employees install a simple browser plugin that enables them to receive content recommendations from a centralized marketing team, while also enabling them to recommend content to the marketing team and to one another. The marketing team then gets detailed statistics showing which employees are sharing content on social, how many clicks and engagement actions each employee is generating, etc.
addvocate
Addvocate enables you to share content with colleagues.
It’s an incredibly easy-to-use, remarkably inexpensive (just a few dollars per month) social media tool that removes the pain of teamwork and content sharing/distribution. I use it constantly to share potential topics for inclusion in our daily email newsletter.
Jay Baer, founder of Convince & Convert.

#3: Swayy

jamie turner
Jamie Turner
The best new tool I’ve seen in many months is called Swayy. It’s a platform that drops interesting content into a dashboard where you can scan or read the most interesting articles.
The best feature isn’t the fact that the articles are dropped right in front of your nose. The best feature is the sharing.
swayy
Swayy finds you the best content to share with your target audience.
At the bottom of each article, you can click the “share” button and it automatically opens up your TwitterFacebook and LinkedIn profiles.
With the click of a button, you’re able to share articles across multiple platforms. Plus, you can schedule your sharing times well in advance. That way, you’re able to share multiple articles across multiple platforms multiple times a day. Brilliant!
Jamie Turner, founder of the 60 Second Marketer.

#4: eGrabber’s Account-Researcher

viveka von rosen
Viveka Von Rosen
One of the reasons LinkedIn works so well is that it tells us exactly how we’re related to the people in our network and the best ways of communicating with them (messages, invitations, introductions and InMails, in that order).
LinkedIn’s limitation is with the folks who fall outside of our network; especially if we don’t have $10 for each InMail we want to send. Another limitation is that LinkedIn is increasingly hiding our connections from us. First taking away last name, then whole name and picture altogether!
Let me start by saying eGrabber Account-Researcher is NOT a free tool. You can get a free trial, but it’s so incredibly powerful for researching prospects that it’s absolutely worth the $80 a month fee. Can you eventually find the same info on Google with the right algorithms? Yes. Will it take you hours and hours to yield results that aren’t as comprehensive? Yes. Is your time worth more than that? YES!
Essentially, Account-Researcher gets through LinkedIn’s restrictions to betterresearch and find a prospect’s contact and company information.
e grabber research
Account-Researcher helps you research a prospect.
It cuts prospect research time down to a few minutes and will help you:
  • Find missing emails and phone numbers of prospects when you have only their name and company.
  • Quickly qualify a company and build a list of key decision-makers that includes name, title, email, phone and social media footprint.
  • Get talking points from news, patents, blogs, press releases and other sources for pre-call prospect research.
    e grabber 1
    A quick way to find decision-makers within a company.
LinkedIn isn’t about selling your stuff. It’s about finding and engaging with people, developing that feeling of “knowing, liking and trusting.” And once you’ve established a relationship with the person, you can move to the next stage in the game. The more you know about prospects, the better your chance of getting to that next stage.
The power of LinkedIn is that it helps us connect with real people in real life. We need to go old school. Do searches, do research and then pick up the phone! Account-Researcher makes that MUCH easier.
Viveka von Rosen, author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day, host of #LinkedInChat and co-moderator of LinkedStrategies.

#5: Compfight

rich brooks pic
Rich Brooks
Photos are a great way to engage people on your blog and draw them into your post. They also grab attention when someone shares your blog post on Facebook or another social media channel. Unfortunately, good photography can cost a lot of money, and with regular blogging, the investment can add up fast. Enter Compfight.
Compfight searches Flickr’s photos that have the appropriate Creative Commons license for Commercial Use.
compfight
Compfight is a great tool when searching for an image for a blog post.
Do a quick search for ideas, objects, emotions—whatever will best represent the idea in your blog post. Compfight will even provide you with the HTML code for proper attribution. (Yes, you need to give attribution to the photographer, but that’s a small price to pay!)
If you’re blogging regularly but working on a shoestring budget, be sure to give Compfight a try!
Rich Brooks, president of flyte new media, a web design and Internet marketing company that helps small businesses succeed online.

#6: Tagboard

Kim Garst
Kim Garst
Tagboard is my new cool social media tool. To describe it simply, Tagboard is a way to monitor keywords (a.k.a. hashtags) across multiple social media channels.
To monitor conversations that revolve around specific hashtagson Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and Vine, Tagboard pulls in content from all of these sites based on a specified hashtag and creates a custom board filled with content from all platforms.
Why Is it Useful?
1. Brand monitoring. It’s useful to anyone who monitors their own brand or other people’s brands as a part of their business. It is especially useful for small business owners who do not want to invest in social media monitoring.
2. Content Curation. It’s a great way to find content around a specific topic. For example, if you want to find out what others are saying about breaking industry news, search by keyword(s) and find articles, conversations, etc. Once you conduct the search, narrow the focus to a single social media platform. In other words, view just tweets with that specific hashtag. You can even reply to the conversations right from within Tagboard!
tagboard twitter tip
You can reply to the conversation.
3. Real-time Leads at Your Fingertips! Suppose you’re a realtor in Miami and you’re looking to connect with people who are moving to Miami. Search for real-time conversations that are taking place on multiple social media platforms using targeted keywords such as #MovingToMiami. Connect, share some valuable info and start working on building a relationship that will lead to a potential sale.
search realtime conversations
Search for real-time conversation around targeted keywords.
Best of all, it’s a free tool! Check it out!
Kim Garst, CEO of Boom Social.

#7: ManageFlitter

stephanie sammons
Stephanie Sammons
A cool social media tool that has helped me get a better handle on effectively managing my Twitter account is ManageFlitter.
As you’re probably aware, Twitter can be very noisy! A tool that can help you manage your account while growing your following with the right people is very valuable. The ManageFlitter motto is “Work Faster and Smarter with Twitter.”
ManageFlitter integrates with your Twitter account to help you effectively:
  • Find relevant people to follow and connect with by searching Twitter bios, locations and keywords
  • Unfollow inactive accounts, spam accounts (you can force them to unfollow you as well) or accounts with no profile images
  • Schedule and post tweets at optimal times when your followers are most likely to see your updates
  • Monitor keywords, hashtags, usernames and even websites mentioned on Twitter
  • Get analytics on your Twitter account
Although some of the above features are paid, you can sign up for a free account and get access to basic features for testing the service. The Pro Plan for more robust individual users is $12/month.
manage flitter price plan
ManageFlitter has several price plans to choose from.
One caveat with ManageFlitter or any Twitter-based tool that can help you manage your account is to understand Twitter’s following rules and best practices. Ultimately you’re responsible for adhering to these rules. ManageFlitter has been working with Twitter for over 3 years and they’ve helped almost 2 million users.
I would recommend using ManageFlitter to build a more relevant following, keep your account cleaned up and prioritize quality over quantity!
Stephanie Sammons, founder and CEO of Wired Advisor.

#8: Socialbakers

Stephanie Shkolnik
Stephanie Shkolnik
Socialbakers has an effective tool called Analytics Pro, which provides an understanding of how your brand stacks up against your competitors, specifically across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—for now.
The simple interface allows you to input a social media channel and gain insights into engagement rates and channel growth, and understand which contributors from your social communities are most active, providing an opportunity to build relationships and enable continued advocacy.
social baker analytics pro
Check out how your brand compares to others in your niche.
An otherwise painfully manual process, this tool also allows you to see how you’re performing against your competitors to learn which campaigns, content and influencers are driving the most effective conversations.
While Socialbakers is a paid tool, a trial period will impress you and show decision-makers how much more effectively your time will be spent on reporting, gaining insights and informing social strategy.
Stephanie Shkolnik, social media director at Digitaria.

#9: Post Planner

Ian Cleary
Ian Cleary
Post Planner is a content management tool that runs as an application within Facebook. What’s great about Post Planner is that in addition to providing the ability to schedule content, it also provides fantastic facilities for sourcing and adding content to your queue for later posting.
You can search a database of thousands of status updates on a range of general topics, find content that’s trending in your niche or add Facebook pages, Twitter accounts or blogs and easily add content to your queue from these sources.
postplanner
You can easily add content to your queue.
It also provides real-time analytics on posts, so you immediately see what’s working and not working.
Post Planner is a time saver, enabling you to plan and manage your Facebook content in advance, rather than doing it off the cuff.
Ian Cleary, founder of RazorSocial.

#10: Komfo

neal schaffer
Neal Schaffer
There are a lot of Facebook page analytic tools and social media dashboards that include Facebook analysis.
A problem with some of these tools is that they try to do so much that it’s hard to gain simple-to-understand, meaningful insight about your Facebook content strategy from them. Others just provide a lot of data, some in better-looking forms than others, without offering any other handholding as to how that data can be utilized to improve your Facebook engagement.
That’s why it was refreshing to discover a new free Facebook page analytics toolfrom Komfo—a company claiming to be “the leading tool provider in the Nordics within the Social Media Marketing space.”
Komfo provides analysis with additional handholding to help you analyze your Facebook content based on the following types of analytics:
  • Fan Penetration: In essence, this is EdgeRank—a figure that shows what percentage of your fans you’re reaching with each post. If the average EdgeRank on Facebook is said to be 16%, you can easily see an average from your last 30 days’ posts up to a maximum of 100. Of course, you can drill down into each post to see which is working for better or worse.
  • Viral Amplification: Don’t be fooled by comparing this to the “viral” analytics provided by Facebook Insights. That number only looks at the percentage of People Talking About This compared to your total fan base. While that’s a nice number to know, wouldn’t you like to know the viral reach of each of your posts as compared to its organic reach? This is exactly what this data shows you for each post, with anything over 1.0 being considered “viral” (i.e., more people saw this post in a news feed via viral reach as compared to organic reach).
  • CTR: Once again, although the total number of click-throughs are provided in Insights as “Engaged Users,” Komfo takes it one step further and gives you a click-through ratio for each post as a percentage of how many people saw the post.
  • Spam Score: We all know that negative feedback from your fans can have a heavy impact on your EdgeRank. Unfortunately, with the current implementation of Insights, you need to dig deep into seeing the “Engaged Users” for each post to check for mention of negative feedback. Komfo’s tool conveniently shows the ratio of negative feedback as a percentage of total clicks.
    komfo report
    Komfo is a great tool to help you analyze your Facebook content.
The tool also includes the “People Talking About This” number, which they call “Stories,” as well as overall Reach. Another welcome feature is the ability to send an email and give others access to your report online without Facebook authorization. This is a nice touch that makes the tool even more useful for large and distributed teams.
Neal Schaffer, founder of Maximize Social Business.

#11: Rignite

andrea vahl
Andrea Vahl
An interesting tool I recently discovered is Rignite, which helpsmonitor several social media platforms—including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube—from one place. It was just launched in April and they will be adding features and other social networks.
The best thing about the tool is the team aspect of this product. You can have forums and chats within the tool, and assign tasks to people on the team. So this works well for teams of 3-6 people who are managing the same accounts.
They have tracking and insights incorporated into the dashboard.
rignite
You can monitor your fan base within the dashboard.
This tool will become even more valuable as they add some of the features they have planned to help monitor your social media contacts more closely. While the tool works well right now for monitoring and posting to your accounts for a team of people, I think this will be one to watch as it evolves!
Andrea Vahl, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, uses her improv comedy skills to blog as Grandma Mary, Social Media Edutainer.

#12: SocialOomph

Jeff Bullas
Jeff Bullas
One of the coolest social media marketing tools that I’ve discovered and used is SocialOomph.
The challenge for most bloggers and social media marketers is not just creating the content, but also distributing it. Twitter is a great social media network to assist you with sharing your content to your followers, but having to tweet constantly is time-consuming.
SocialOomph (professional edition, which costs about $25 a month) allows you to not only load and schedule tweets, you can also make them recurring, saving you the onerous and time-consuming task of ongoing scheduling.
Load your tweets once, then set and forget.
socialoomph tweet feature
SocialOomph is useful for scheduling evergreen content.
SocialOomph lets you load up to 500 unique tweets and the major benefit is that it saves me about 25-30 hours a week, or 100-120 hours per month, of ongoing tweet scheduling!
Jeff Bullas, blogger, author, strategist and speaker.

#13: Zapier

paul colligan
Paul Colligan
Zapier has changed the social media marketing game for me in the most dramatic of ways. This service connects systems in ways once only possible with a massive programming budget.
You can say things across the social networks like “text your email to (503) 405-4415 to get the free video (or just leave a message if you don’t have texting)” and have that sync automatically with whatever email system you’re using (from MailChimp to AWeber) and/or with any CRM you run (from Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Salesforce).
zapier
You can automate tasks among online services.
Zapier also automatically generates a Google spreadsheet for you that tracks every time a certain keyword is mentioned in Twitter and makes it possible for you toautomatically send selected Facebook Posts to your blog. In addition, when you do a webcast (paid or otherwise) through Eventbrite, all of the information collected is integrated into everything else you’re doing (I leverage everything they offer to make my event as social as possible).
The possibilities are endless, and you should see the running list of integration ideas I have.
At the time I write this, Zapier brags of 233 web services integrated. I’m sure they’ll add more before this piece is published. With Zapier, social is now one big ecosystem, and I’m thrilled to play in it.
Paul Colligan, director of content marketing at Instant Customer.

#14: FixYourFunnel and Mobivity

beth hayden
Beth Hayden
Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to attend a live workshop given by the fabulous Pam Slim (author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, and a world-renowned business coach). At the end of Pam’s talk, she told the audience that she had a handout for us.
Pam surprised me by announcing a phone number and saying “Text your name and email address to that number, and I’ll send you the handout.” I could see people whipping out their phones so they could text her. There were no messy sign-up sheets and people could follow her instructions on the spot—and she got their email addresses right away, so she could follow up with possible leads.
I had never seen anyone utilize text messages for that purpose, and thought it was a great idea, so I followed up with Pam later and asked her how she pulled off this cool process. She recommended two tools: FixYourFunnel (an Infusionsoft-specific tool) and Mobivity.
fix your funnel
Utilize text messages for your business.
mobivity
Avoid messy sign-up sheets and use a text messaging service instead.
As a consultant and author who does regular public speaking and training, I can’t wait to integrate these smart mobile marketing tools into my sales process and see the results I get!
Beth Hayden, author of Pinfluence, a speaker and social media expert.

Who are these social media pros?

social media success summit
The social media marketing experts who contributed to this article are all speaking at the Social Media Success Summit.
Social Media Success Summit 2013 is a live online conference that will empower you to use social media to gain more exposure, increase traffic, cultivate loyal fans and grow your business. More than 45 of the world’s leading social media proswill show you how. The event is spread over four weeks in October.
Join nearly 3,000 fellow marketers at the online mega-conference designed to empower and inspire you with social media marketing tactics—brought to you by Social Media Examiner.

Why should you attend Social Media Success Summit?

You’ll hear from 45+ of the world’s top social media marketing pros as they reveal their newest social media marketing tips and practical, real-world, proven examples.
You’ll be able to take your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, blogging, podcasting and video marketing to an entirely new level.
What do you think? Do you use any of these social media tactics? What’s working well for you today? Please share your thoughts in the box below.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORCindy King
Cindy King is the director of editorial for Social Media Examiner. She spent 25 years abroad in international business development and then built her own international business from scratch by using social business networking. Other posts by  »