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Guest Author: Tejas Veeramani
Do you remember when the power supply to a much-anticipated Superbowl Game was interrupted? This was followed by a Tweet from Oreo, the ever-popular cookie manufacturer, with an image captioned, “You can still dunk in the dark”.
The post was re-tweeted more than ten thousand times in an hour and proved to be a huge boost to the Oreo brand’s online reputation.
Social media trends are nearly impossible to predict because they are often based on real-time events. A company called Sickweather was able to pinpoint the geographic origin of illnesses based on public Tweets and Facebook updates of people in those areas, proving that there may be ways to monitor social media and gain insight into the possibilities the future holds.
Yet no tool can predict more generic social media trends that are truly spontaneous, like the one that was spurred by Oreo’s #dunkinthedark. So your best approach is to use a few of these social media tools to help you track social media marketing trends and really capitalize on them.
Current HOT Social Media Trends
While we’re talking about trends, here are the top three that seem to dominate the social media scene:
- Relationships between customers and businesses are becoming more personal: Customers value businesses that maintain a personal relationship with them more than businesses that are only keen on promoting their products or services. In fact, a survey by Fractl and Buzzstream found that 45% of the respondents would unfollow a brand on social media if it posted too much promotional content.
- More visual content is being generated and consumed: The popularity of video websites like YouTube and Vine has led to a huge increase in the production and consumption of short video content, which manages to deliver a message or start a conversation more effectively than regular textual content. The staggering growth of sites like Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest also reflects the increasing popularity of visual content as a medium of communication.
- Businesses are using content curation for social media management: More and more people are considering the online presence of a company to determine its reliability and credibility. The content that businesses post to their social media accounts now reaches a much larger audience than ever before, prompting them to turn to content curation tools to ensure that they have a steady stream of good content.
Clearly, it would make a huge difference to your business’ bottom line if you are able to establish and maintain a strong presence on social media. There are many social media management tools which you can use to improve the impact that you make on your audience.
Here are five such tools which would aid your social media marketing efforts:
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DrumUp.io – Discover And Collect Interesting, Meaningful Content
DrumUp.io is a content curation and scheduling application which helps you discover interesting content that you can share on social media. It supports Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts and allows you to manage all these accounts through a single dashboard eliminating the need for you to log into each of them separately. The content suggestions are based on the keywords you set for each account and can be changed at any time based on your preferences. The design of the app is minimalistic and clean. It allows you to queue suggested posts, as well as custom posts, and schedule them for sharing days, weeks, or even months in advance.
2. Easel.ly – Create Compelling, Original Infographics
The task of creating infographics is made much simpler with this tool, where you get ready templates over which you simply have to drag and drop your content. The images created are high-quality ones and it makes presenting data visually extremely easy. The interface is very intuitive and requires almost no time to understand and master.
Even functions like layering (which is quite complicated in Photoshop) is much easier to perform on Easel.ly. There are also hundreds of pictures that you can browse while you are building your infographic. If you are not an experienced graphic designer you can use this tool to create great visual content.
And don’t forget to Pin your infographic!
3. Followerwonk – Analyze And Build Your Twitter Influence
Followerwonk gives you the ability to analyze your Twitter profile and get many useful insights. Once linked with your Twitter account it gives you a detailed report about who your followers are, the geographical region they belong to, their social authority, the total number of followers you have, the number of tweets, the number of new followers, unfollows and other such data. The analysis tells you which topics generate the most engagement, helps you identify influencers and also gives you a better understanding of your audience. It is an invaluable tool when you are trying to market your service or product.
4. If This Then That (IFTTT) – Automate and Simplify Your Social Media
IFTTT is probably one of the simplest automation services available. Simple tasks like receiving an email to remind yourself of a task or an upcoming event, saving important content to Dropbox, or cross-posting a Tweet on Instagram can all be automated on IFTTT. The tool simply uses the icons of these services for you to create automated processes, which the website calls “recipes”. Once you have created a recipe, you can change any of its parameters or even choose to turn it off. The tool also allows you to browse through public recipes of other people
5. Canva – Create Graphics With Drop And Drag Technology – EASY!
Another awesome tool to create visual content, Canva makes it easy for you to design original images for your Facebook, Instagram and other social media posts. The tool lets you choose from hundreds of thousands of existing high-definition photographs, posters, advertisements and other such content templates. Functions are very intuitive, making it easy to add text and layers to your images.
While it’s a good idea to establish your presence on multiple social media platforms, the content you share on them will have to be tailored to each specific platform. Using social media tools will make managing multiple accounts a stress-free task. Try out different tools to see which ones would be most useful to you. Do not hesitate to explore new applications, as they might provide exactly what you are looking for. The ultimate objective should be to make social media management less time-consuming, which in turn will let you invest more man-hours in the core functions of your business.
Have you tried any of these tools? Which are your favorites and why?
Author Bio:
Tejas Veeramani is a blogger at Godot Media, a popular content service firm, where he writes about content marketing and social media marketing. His other interests include music and gaming.
