The Brit Awards are the most tweeted about show in the UK

After a 10-year high in ratings last year, the Brit Awards last night marked one of the lowest-rated broadcasts yet, with a mere 4.20m viewers. The show still broke one record though, and not the music kind. With a little help from Beyoncé and One Direction, just over 4,000,000 tweets were sent during the show, which doubled last years total and was just half a million less than the viewers who tuned in to watch it in real-time.

Source: gizbot.com

The music awards, despite attracting less viewers, overtook X Factor as the most tweeted about show in the UK. But if the show wasn't exciting enough to entice tons of viewers, what made it so tweetable?

Although the show had over 4 million tweets, only 2.17 million of them were posted on the site. The other 2 million were for the Brit Awards first ever social vote for Best British Video.

It's the first time a prize has been voted for during the live event, and made the show more interactive for viewers at home. Each nominated video was assigned a hashtag for voters. Sadly enough for the other nominees, One Direction won the award hands down.

That led teenage heart-throb Harry Styles to send out a loving tweet to fans...

Which led to over 150,000 retweets, and over 200,000 favourites, making it the most retweeted tweet of the night.

Beyoncé was the most tweeted about performer of the evening, after her live performance was announced just a few hours before the appearance.

Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys performed a rock'n'roll stunt, dropping the microphone on the stage during his speech. The rebellious act resulted in his name top-trending on Twitter.

What's more, the tweets hit a record peak of 78 thousand tweets per minute... that's 1,300 per second. The highest demographic of tweeters were female, which is not surprising, since a lot of them revolved around One Direction.

29 Social Media Tools Recommended by the Pros

Are you looking for ways to enhance your social media marketing?

Do you want new tools to simplify your job?

We asked a group of social media pros for the hottest social media tools they use today.

Check them out to see if these social media tools are a good fit for you!

#1: RivalIQ

 Jay Baer

Figuring out precisely what works in social media is a tricky (yet entirely necessary) proposition.

I’m always seeking to improve clicks, shares and social media engagement on my own content as well as our Convince and Convert clients’ content.

Recently, I started using RivalIQ to get at what’s working in social, and this easy-to-use, reasonably priced analysis platform produces a steady stream of insights while saving me a ton of time.

Here, I set up a collection of consumer products companies (RivalIQ calls them a “landscape”) for a strategic plan we’re building. With just a click or two, I can find the top 50 Facebook posts (by engagement rate or total engagement behaviors) among these companies over the past 7, 14, 30 or 90 days.

RivalIQ provides competitive intelligence.

Plus, I can click another button and export the snazzy charts and graphs to PDF or PowerPoint instantly.

RivalIQ also has a nifty alerts function, so if a company I’m monitoring publishes a disproportionately successful tweet, Facebook post or LinkedIn post—or even changes their website home page copy—I get an email letting me know.

Today, as the industry matures, social media is less about colonization, and more about optimization. RivalIQ helps me learn and improve every day. I like the software so much, I immediately invested in the company.

If you want to see an entire landscape and kick the tires, I built one just for Social Media Examiner readers that you can access here. It includes many of the major national Olympics organizations and their social media.

Jay Baer is the founder of Convince & Convert.

#2: Pocket

Mari Smith

One of the biggest challenges in social media is how to consistently curate and create exceptional content. A wonderful tool I love to use for the curation part is Pocket!

Pocket (formerly Read It Later) allows you to consume and save a wide variety of online articles, which you can then post to Twitter or Facebook, schedule via Buffer or review at a later time.

Save a variety of online articles to share with your audience at a later date.

Pocket has many options for integrating with your existing systems: a browser-based option at GetPocket, a Chrome Extension with Twitter integration (see screenshot below) and a mobile app for all operating systems.

Pocket Chrome extension with Twitter integration.

Plus, Pocket is integrated into more than 500 apps including Flipboard, Tweetbot (my favorite Twitter mobile app) and even Facebook’s new mobile reader app, Paper.

As a regular practice in my company, first I take time to review my Twitter and Facebook lists and quickly save the standout articles to Pocket, adding appropriate tags for various social networks.

Then, my content manager reviews Pocket and pulls out the articles I’ve saved, adding them to the collection she’s already cherry-picked and scheduled for me on HootSuite. The main platform I use my Pocket articles on is Twitter, followed by my Facebook page where I add a tag. I like to schedule my own Facebook posts directly on my page, as I always add a personal narrative.

Give Pocket a try if you haven’t already; I’m sure you’ll love it, too!

Mari Smith is a leading social media strategist and premier Facebook marketing expert. She is co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day and author of The New Relationship Marketing.

#3: ShareRoot

Ekaterina Walter

I am most impressed by ShareRoot because it is an all-in-one solution for Pinterest. The company offers a suite of self-service tools that you can use to manage content on Pinterest, drive Pinterest engagement and produce sales.

ShareRoot is such a time-saver because it lets you schedule pins. It also has a cross-promotional pin creator, board cover creator and a Pinterest tab for Facebook so you can convert your Facebook fans to Pinterest followers.

ShareRoot’s toolset helps brands manage their Pinterest page.

Two of ShareRoot’s core tools, contest management and Pinterest targeted advertising, help you achieve deeper connections while growing your engagement rates.

ShareRoot is currently testing its flash sales tool that helps generate revenue and turns your followers and interested pinners into paying customers.

Ekaterina Walter is the co-founder and CMO of Branderati, and author of The Power of Visual Storytelling.

#4: PowToon

Brian Carter

I want to tell you about PowToon (an easy way to make videos), but first let’s look at YouTube, because great content doesn’t help if no one sees it.

I’m always on the lookout for the next digital marketing opportunity that will give a big advantage over competitors. Right now, that opportunity is YouTube PreRoll (a.k.a. YouTube in-stream) advertising. The barrier to entry is creating a high-quality video, which can be expensive because even the most affordable video creation companies charge at least $300 to $1500.

Enter PowToon. It’s one of the easiest and cheapest ways to create a good video and—this is the crazy part—it’s free.

PowToon gives you an animated video workspace and makes it easy to create your own videos.

Having a PowToon video got Visioniz a 37% increase in sales and boosted SimpleWifi‘s conversion rate by 300%.

If you take your time with PowToon, you can create something that’s more than adequate in a matter of hours and start taking advantage of YouTube PreRoll the next day.

To prove my point, I made this PowToon in just over an hour, and it was my first one! The quality and speed can only get better from there.


Brian Carter is the author of The Like Economy and LinkedIn For Business.

#5: EveryoneSocial

Jesse Stay

My favorite social media tool is EveryoneSocial. The app encourages businesses to engage 
employees as “social ambassadors,” making them key parts of the company’s social media strategy.

The website empowers employees to find engaging content they can share with their followers on different social networks using EveryoneSocial’s powerful content discovery engine.

Alternatively, EveryoneSocial can recommend articles and websites for employees to share, giving your company a very large voice that’s much more personal than a generic Facebook page or Twitter account.

EveryoneSocial helps employees be brand ambassadors.

EveryoneSocial provides a powerful analytics engine to track how much employees are sharing, as well as how well they’re driving clicks. The analytics even allow you to get employees competing against each other for the top sharing spot.

EveryoneSocial drives home an important paradigm shift in social media. The future of social media is not just Facebook pages, Google+ pages or Twitter accounts. The future of social is in empowering individuals—including your employees—to share your products one with another.

The more you promote and empower your employees and key player social presences, the stronger social media success you’ll have in the future.

Jesse Stay is the founder and owner of Stay N’ Alive Productions, LLC.

#6: vCita

Jon Loomer

My current favorite tool is vCita. It’s a plugin that manages the purchase and booking process of my one-on-one coaching sessions. vCita calls itself a “client engagement platform for small businesses.”
If you’ve ever been to my site, you’ve undoubtedly seen the active engage flyout that happens at the bottom right.

The active engage flyout on JonLoomer.com.

When you click the Schedule Now button, you are taken directly to my calendar where I’ve set specific times and days that are open for one-on-one sessions. vCita also dynamically syncs with my Google calendar, so whenever I add an event that is a conflict, vCita will block it off on my calendar.

Cita lets visitors choose a meeting date and time on your calendar.

One-on-one sessions were a minor part of my business until about six months ago. It wasn’t until I started using vCita that they became a major part. In fact, I was forced to raise the price of my sessions to keep up with demand!

Jon Loomer is a Facebook marketing coach, author, speaker and strategist. 

#7: OptinMonster

Ian Cleary

Growing the number of email subscribers for your blog is a great way to build a relationship with potential customers, but it’s challenging to convert visitors to subscribers.

OptinMonster is a WordPress plugin that helps you create attention-grabbing opt-in forms. The plugin is really well designed and you can get a variety of opt-in boxes up and running very quickly.

Create attention-grabbing opt-in forms.

One of the most interesting features of OptinMonster is the Exit Intent feature. You can create a popup box to collect emails and set it up so that it only appears when your website visitor is about to leave your website.

OptinMonster tracks the position of your visitor’s mouse pointer and if they move it outside the main window, the popup appears. The plugin also has options for a floating footer bar and a slide-in box.
Ian Cleary is the founder of RazorSocial.

#8: smqueue

Neal Schaffer

I have become a BIG fan of smqueue.

If you have over 100 blog posts or pieces of content that you want to share once or twice a day, this tool is a great way to automate those social media posts. You can share them on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

You can set recurring queue time slots.

While some may cringe at the thought of any automation in social media, numerous studies have shown that promoting the same post multiple times helps your content become more discoverable in social media. Other than paid social, using some element of automation is the only way a social media marketer can scale.

The challenge though, becomes in ensuring that both the content and timing are relevant. Assuming that the content you want to share is evergreen, continue reading!

smqueue gives you control over the wording of your post (including adding a photo and shortening your link), how frequently and at what times to post and when to expire content.

You decide the wording, posting frequency and expiration of content.

The only drawbacks are that you must have at least 100 entries for the recurring queue to begin, and you cannot brand the shortened URL.

By regularly adding new content to the queue and moderating it, I have found smqueue to be an excellent way of augmenting what I am already doing in social media marketing, with no additional effort other than the setup.

Neal Schaffer is the president of Maximize Your Social, author of Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing: Understanding, Leveraging and Maximizing LinkedIn.

#9: Nimble

Viveka von Rosen

I started using Nimble because I’m one of those social media “super connectors” whose network is just way too big. Even with tagging and lists and all the other ways I have of segmenting my audience, I just couldn’t keep up with all of my key connections.

Nimble does a really good job of helping me find and engage with my important contacts via the Engagement Opportunities From Important Contacts feature on their homepage. I don’t know what algorithm they use, but its freaky accurate!

Nimble also lets you keep a list of activities to do and people to stay in touch with, as well as track leads, prospects and deals.

With Nimble’s Deals function I can pull a prospect from my contacts, add details of our potential deal, track that deal through its different stages and either close the deal or if it falls apart, make notes as to why. And, of course, I can export that information.

Create deals within Nimble.

The tracking is crucial to refining my prospecting funnel so that I close more deals more effectively. (And not as many prospects fall through the giant gaping cracks in my brain.)

Nimble gives me more filters than LinkedIn to sort my contacts, allows me to search keywords and hashtags throughout my social networks, tracks my activities on the calendar feature, lists my messages and lets me sort them. As a bonus, Nimble allows me to delegate work to my assistant and it plays well with HootSuite.

If you haven’t tried Nimble yet, you should. It isn’t just a vibrant social CRM, it’s a one-stop shop for contact, calendar, prospect, deal and even inbox management!

Viveka von Rosen is the author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day and known internationally as the “LinkedIn Expert.”

#10: BuzzSumo

Lee Odden

BuzzSumo is a free tool you can use to identify the links that are most shared on social networks, as well as influencers for specific topics.

For example, if you want to know the top content by social shares for a certain keyword phrase, BuzzSumo provides social share information that includes Google+ shares, Facebook likes, LinkedIn shares and Twitter shares. You can filter the data by content type (e.g., article, infographic, videos, guest posts and more).

You can also search a domain to find the pages with the most social shares and then filter by Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. This is handy for spot checking your own site and others’.

You can search for the social shares on any URL.

The influencer search option offers a list of people who match your query and includes their Twitter information. You can filter these results by type (e.g., bloggers, influencers, companies and journalists), then export to CSV or Excel for further analysis.

BuzzSumo is definitely a work in progress, but as a free tool, there are some very interesting features and it’s really easy to use.

Lee Odden is the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing.

#11: Harvest

Jamie Turner

In the early days of social media, things were much simpler. You’d write a blog post, share it on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and be done with it. But as time has gone on, social media has become more complex and time-consuming.

Today, you might have multiple social media campaigns running for both your own company and for your clients’ companies. It’s gotten harder to figure out where your time is going (and which client to bill for your efforts). If that’s as much of a problem for you as it is for me, then you’ll want to check out Harvest.

It’s the simplest and easiest time-tracking tool I’ve found (and I’ve done plenty of homework on this). The user interface makes it incredibly simple to add a project and track your time. Better still, if you’re a consultant, agency or business owner, you can track different projects for different clients and analyze the results. It even has a billing module that allows you to invoice clients for the work.

Tracking your time is easy with Harvest.

In the long run, Harvest has enough features that you can use it to track all of your time, but it’s streamlined enough just to track time on your social media campaigns if that’s all you need. I love it. Check it out!

Jamie Turner is the CEO of 60 Second Marketer.

#12: Calendly

Douglas Karr

Over the last decade I’ve amassed quite a following on social media. The process is fairly consistent: Folks follow me, then they listen or watch me in a podcast, video or webinar, and when they need my assistance, they connect. This connection point is critical. People need your help on their schedule, not yours.

In the past, I’ve been really difficult (if not impossible) to get a hold of. I get dozens of calls and hundreds of email requests every day. If all I did was negotiate common times to connect, I would lose half of my week. Compound that with the back and forth of “What time is good for you?” emails and the time lost is downright frustrating.

The truth is I’m terrible at managing my calendar, so why not let the people who want to connect with me handle it themselves? This is what Calendly does for me.

Let Calendly manage your calendar for you.

When people view my Calendly, they’ll see the times I’m available to meet. They can find the date and time that works for them and set it on Calendly, then Calendly synchronizes directly to my Google calendar.

Social media isn’t very valuable unless it’s leading to opportunity. Calendly helps me find those opportunities!

Douglas Karr is the founder of DK New Media.

#13: Friends+Me

Denise Wakeman

One of my current favorite social media resources is Friends+Me, an automated social sharing tool. While I know the topic of social media automation is controversial, sometimes it makes sense when time is limited and you want to get your message out to several different networks.

Friends+Me enables you to share (repost) your publicly published Google+ posts to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Tumblr. It’s important to note that if your Google+ post is private, Friends+Me will not repost it anywhere.

Friends+Me broadcasts your messages to other networks.

With Friends+Me, you can manage exactly where you want to repost your content. For example, if you want to repost on Facebook but not on your LinkedIn profile or Twitter, you simply tag the post #f and it will only be published on your Facebook page or profile.

Recently, Friends+Me added a scheduling feature that you can choose to enable or disable. By scheduling reposts, you control the day and time they show up on your other networks.

For example, you may not want your Google+ posts to simultaneously publish to your other social profiles. You can easily schedule them to post to those networks as soon as 5 minutes later or up to 3 days later.

You can schedule your Google+ posts with Friends+Me.

Why would you use this tool? If you’re active on Google+, you know the conversations are rich and often go deeper than on other networks. When you repost from Google+, it includes a link back to the post on your Google+ profile or page. It’s an easy way to encourage your connections to join you on Google+ and build your community there, as well as introduce people to new content and thought leaders.

Denise Wakeman is an online marketing strategist and host of Adventures in Visibility, a live hangout on air helping entrepreneurs boost their visibility on the web.

#14: BuzzFork

Stanford Smith

BuzzFork is a Twitter marketing tool that helps get your profile in front of Twitter users based on common interests. It uses an algorithm to review a user’s tweets (based on your criteria), then favorites those tweets from your account.

If you’re like me, you pay close attention to people who favorite your tweets and probably follow them back. BuzzFork leverages this social quid pro quo to add targeted followers to your Twitter audience.

I was extremely skeptical about BuzzFork’s “favoriting” algorithm, but was pleasantly surprised with the results. Almost all of the favorites were for tweets that I found useful, entertaining and relevant.

Try BuzzFork’s favoriting algorithm.

BuzzFork also helps you analyze your recent followers based on their Klout score and interests. This information is useful for discovering popular topics within your Twitter community.

A quick review of my dashboard revealed that productivity is a popular topic, and that prompted me to write several successful articles about it.

You can find out about popular topics in your dashboard.

All of your follower data can be exported, allowing you to segment your recent followers by interests. This comes in handy if you want to promote interest-specific topics to Twitter influencers.

BuzzFork is the perfect tool for bloggers who want to quickly expand their Twitter reach in a smart and personalized way.

Stanford Smith is the co-author of Born to Blog, and offers practical blog and content marketing tips and strategies at Pushing Social.

#15: Newsle

Stephanie Sammons

Newsle has become one of my most favorite social media tools for gathering relevant and important stories about the members of my network. I’m spending time on this site daily.

Newsle is a free tool that finds real published news about real people (it doesn’t find tweets or social status updates).

Newsle integrates and follows your LinkedIn connections, personal Facebook connections and email contacts, then scours the web for recently published articles about those people. You can also follow and track online stories about anyone, even those who are outside of your network!

Not only does Newsle show articles about your first-degree network, it goes a step further with the Friends of Friends feature. This is a great way to find new relevant people to contact and build a relationship with.

You can rank the articles that are surfaced by most recent or most interesting in your Newsle dashboard, and you can share the articles with your social networks or via email.

You can share the most recent articles from your dashboard with your social networks.

What works really well is to send a private email to your connection referencing an article you’ve seen about them in Newsle, or even promote the article publicly to your social networks with a tag or mention. This is a great way to strengthen a relationship and give your connection greater visibility through promotion.

If you’re publishing or being quoted in online articles, be sure to submit them to Newsle so you can build your own profile and help others find and follow you.

I’m a huge fan of Newsle as a social media tool that can help you become a smarter marketer. I highly recommend you check it out!

Stephanie Sammons is the founder of Build Online Influence.

#16: Piktochart

John Lee Dumas

I recently discovered Piktochart, an infographic and graphic design app. My favorite thing about the app is that you don’t need any design experience to create amazing graphics for your social media posts because Piktochart offers really great resources, including video tutorials.

Piktochart has several themes to choose from, and they offer a free account or a pro account.

There are many themes to choose from.

I’ve been able to create some really good infographics with just the free account, and they’ve been great for use in blog posts and across social media to help promote content we’ve created for our audience.

Here’s an example of an infographic I created that walks you through preparing for a Skype video interview. I wouldn’t have been able to create it on my own without the app.

Use Piktochart to create an infographic to promote your content.

Piktochart is really an all-around great app that ups your social media game by providing you the opportunity to easily create intriguing infographics for your audience to consume!

John Lee Dumas is the founder and host of EntrepreneurOnFire.

#17: 22Social

Ric Dragon

The team here at DragonSearch has been getting a lot of use lately from the 22Social app for Facebook.

With 22Social, you’re able to turn your Facebook business page into a veritable website. You can create multiple content pages that users access via Facebook tabs, and even configure a like gate—the page people see when they haven’t liked your page yet.

The app provides a portfolio of layout options and in the process encourages some smart communication. Each layout can include video, photos and text.

22Social offers many layouts to choose from.

22Social has illustrated just how well a Facebook page can act as a website by redirecting their own website back into their Facebook page.

22Social isn’t free. It’s $2 for the first month, then $22 (of course, right?) per month after that. Considering how it can really turn your Facebook page into a dynamic lead-generation portal, it’s a fair deal.

Ric Dragon is the CEO of DragonSearch.

#18: Jelly

Simon Mainwaring

Many a business would be better served with direct connections to their customers. In recent years we’ve seen the growth of social media and brands using different channels to interact with customers on many levels.

But with so many different questions being asked and answered all at once, a reliable and manageable feedback loop often gets lost in the shuffle. That’s where Jelly fits in.

What at first seemed like an app designed to ask friends for answers to homework has grown into a social media experience in which brands can directly appeal to their customers’ needs.

Posting a simple question lets your company crowdsource opinions on a specific product, service or issue that you want to know more about.

You can use the Jelly app as a research tool.

Not only does this allow for better managed engagement, but it casts your brand in a positive light because you’re interested, listening and responsive.

The true depth of this app is far from being explored, but I see a very positive future for it in the mix of social media channels.

Simon Mainwaring is the CEO of We First and author of the New York Times bestseller We First.

#19: NeedTagger

Kim Garst

Twitter is a major business-building social media platform. The challenge is sifting through the noise to find conversations that matter to you and your business.

If you’re using Twitter Advanced Search to connect with potential customers, respond to compliments or complaints and directly market your products or services to people who say they need your solutions, then you are going to love NeedTagger!

NeedTagger does the heavy lifting for you. It’s a power search engine built specifically for Twitter. It finds real-time conversations that are taking place about topics you’re interested in.

NeedTagger allows you to search for conversations about your target industry.

People might be talking about your products, news stories that touch your niche or even content that is trending. NeedTagger finds them for you.

Kim Garst is the CEO of Boom Social.

#20: Pushover and IFTTT

Paul Colligan

The immediacy of social media can either be empowering or enslaving, depending on what you do with it. As alerts and updates are coming in 24/7, every marketer must decide when to (and when not to) be interrupted with social updates, messages, replies, etc. Too many interruptions and you won’t ever get any work done.

Conversely, social emergencies seldom happen on a predetermined schedule.

Ever tried to have a conversation with someone who’s always on their phone “in case something happens”? Do you find yourself being that guy (or gal) and wishing you could find a filtering solution that makes sense?

A careful combination of Pushover, a service for sending phone status messages, and the popular service IFTTT, has helped solve this issue for me.

I’ve set it up so that when certain terms are mentioned on certain social services, I’m alerted right away. When urgent stuff happens, I’m notified on both my iPhone (via notifications) and via a vibrating message on my Pebble Watch.

The combination of Pushover and IFTTT allows you to receive real-time notifications on your Android and iOS devices.

Why the Pebble watch? I find it far less intrusive to quickly glance at a watch versus a phone screen when you’re in conversation with someone.

The other stuff I consume on my own terms at a time that makes sense to me.
Paul Colligan is the director of content marketing at Instant Customer.

#21: Swayy

Rick Mulready

If the team that created Swayy is reading this, I’m giving you a virtual high-five right now.
I love Swayy and it’s the coolest social media tool I’ve come across in recent months. It solves the challenge many people have of wanting to consistently find and share valuable content, yet don’t have enough hours in the day to discover it.

It’s like having your own personal assistant that scours the Internet and finds great content for you (like articles, videos and such), so you can share it with your audience. And not just any content, either. It delivers content that’s relevant to your audience and that they’re most likely to engage with.

Swayy helps you discover content to share with your audience.

Swayy integrates with your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

Like many other tools on the market, it has a few different pricing plans that allow you to scale depending on your needs. The free version is very effective though, and great for giving it a test drive.

Definitely give it a try. It will simplify your social media efforts and I have a feeling you’ll want to give the Swayy team a virtual high-five too!

Rick Mulready is the creator of the Inside Social Media Podcast.

#22: Circloscope

Martin Shervington

Google+ circles can require a lot of management. This is why I recommend you use Circloscope (a Chrome extension).

It’s the only tool available that helps you tame your circles, turning them into well-curated, useful collections of people and pages.

Using Circloscope, you can uncircle a selection of people whose accounts are no longer active and uncircle a group of people who don’t circle you back. These are useful tasks to make sure you’re staying up to date with your contacts or freeing up space if you’re close to reaching your 5,000-person limit.

Use Circloscope to easily manage your Google+ circles.

Circloscope also lets you find the people engaging with and sharing your Google+ posts or linked content. This is a huge feature because you can quickly see whom you should spend more time connecting with. You can do the same with Google Ripples, but it is a lot more work!

All in all, Circloscope is an essential circle management system for your Google+ toolkit. I don’t know how I would manage my profile or pages without it.

Martin Shervington is the author of The Art and Science of Google+ and a marketing consultant.

#23: Songza

Mark Schaefer

I have an unusual and fun suggestion for a great new social tool to try. I have become addicted to an app called Songza.

It’s an Internet-style radio station with a social twist. You can find creative and amazing playlists for every possible mood or life situation.

You can find the perfect song to reflect your mood.

The lists are carefully curated by an expert music nerd community and you can comment on the playlists and follow them. So whether you are intently analyzing your tweets, blogging on a quiet Sunday morning, or snapping Instagram photos at a crazy party, you can find the perfect soundtrack to your social media life at Songza!

Mark Schaefer is a college educator, blogger, speaker and consultant who specializes in corporate social media marketing workshops. 

#24: Talkwalker

Gini Dietrich

A few months ago, I discovered Talkwalker as a replacement for Google alerts. If you’re familiar with Google alerts, the setup will look similar.

The Talkwalker home page has the same functionality, and you can decide what information to look for and how you receive updates.

Talkwalker has the same functionality as Google alerts.

When Talkwalker finds new mentions based on your target words, you receive an email broken down by news and blogs. It provides the title, description and link. It also provides a nifty Tweet button so you can share the content directly from your email.

Email alerts are broken down into news and blogs categories.

To boot, they just launched a HootSuite integration, which means you can monitor all of your queries there instead of in your email.

Talkwalker integrates with HootSuite.

While Google alerts still work, I like the results that come from Talkwalker better. The information is more accurate and provides links Google typically misses.

The only thing it doesn’t do is return anything that links to you without mentioning your search query (e.g., if my search query is “Spin Sucks” and someone links to it but calls it “Gini’s blog,” I won’t see it).

Good riddance, Google. We found something better, more accurate and much more convenient.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich.

#25: Hang w/

Joel Comm

Many apps have been used to stream live video to friends and followers, but Hang w/ takes it to the next level by integrating with iOS and Android, as well as delivering the live stream to Facebook’s news feed.

As a broadcaster, you can select 3-, 6- or 9-minute “hang” sessions, and enter a custom title for each live video stream.

You can enter a custom title.

Smartphone followers who have push notifications turned on are instantly notified when someone they are following begins a Hang w/, and they can interact with the broadcaster via text chat.

A great way to create spontaneous broadcasts.

The app needs some polish, but I have a great time creating spontaneous broadcasts and engaging with my followers.

Joel Comm is the author of Twitter Power 2.0 and So, What Do You Do?, and host of the Joel Comm Show, a business podcast.

#26: Meddle

Ted Rubin

I started playing around with Meddle lately. It’s a hybrid social posting, blogging and curation service, with a focus on making it simple to share insights on content you’re reading, while you’re reading it.

I like it because it allows me to turn comments I’d typically leave on a blog post—which have limited visibility and virility—into new content that I can share as my own. Meddle also generates versions of my comments for Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, allowing me to complete the content creation and distribution cycle in a minute.

Meddle is a great curation service.

Adding my editorial perspective on content that matters to my followers is a very effective way for me to get my point across without having to write a full blog post. It also saves the comment, most important part of the post/article and the post URL itself in a place and format I can easily access for content creation at a later date.

I’m looking forward to Meddle adding better mobile support, more social networks and the ability to post content straight into my blog, which the CEO at Meddle tells me is in the works.
However, for people who don’t have the time, skills or desire to blog, this is a great personal content marketing platform in and of itself.

Ted Rubin is a leading social marketing strategist, keynote speaker, brand evangelist and co-author of Return on Relationship.

#27: tchat.io

Michael Stelzner

I recently discovered a new web-based app called tchat.io. The simple interface is great for Twitter chats because you can tweet from within the app, and it automatically adds the chat’s hashtag to all of your tweets.

It’s easy to keep track of the conversation because the app only shows tweets related to a specific hashtag (you can switch hashtags on the fly).

You can tweet from within the app.

This app is close to real time and has all of the basic functionality you would expect from any good hashtag-based Twitter chat client.

If you’re involved with Twitter chats, tchat.io is definitely worth checking out.
Michael Stelzner is the founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner and My Kids’ Adventures.

#28: Canva

Donna Moritz

By far the biggest standout tool for me has been the web-based DIY graphic design tool Canva.
Canva has a healthy library of social media and blog image templates that allow for easy and timely creation of images. No design skills necessary!

Social media templates let you create images quickly and easily.

Canva’s Copy feature makes it easy to create not just one image, but a series of images. If you are creating a tip, how-to or quote image for your community, why stop at one? Make a dozen images by “batching” them.

Simply click on the Copy This Page option to produce an exact copy of your image, then edit the new image to replace text or graphics. Repeat as necessary until you have an entire series of images ready to schedule.

Canva is releasing Instagram-style preset filters with the added ability to create your own unique photo effect for your brand (you can see an exclusive sneak peek below). You can copy the photo effect code across all of your images to develop a consistent style for their visual content.

Canva’s new Photo Effects allows users to get creative!

With a growing list of features that help you create original, shareable images, I am excited to see Canva become a permanent fixture in the toolbox of social media marketers and community managers.

Donna Moritz is the founder of SociallySorted.

#29: LeadPages

Amy Porterfield

LeadPages is a tool that I use on a near-daily basis. When I was first introduced to this tool, I knew that it would help my email list grow in a big way.

I’ve used LeadPages for everything including sales pages, product launches, free giveaways, live webinars and so much more. If there’s a way to use LeadPages, I’ve done it!

I most recently used it for launching a product that is not my own. I created a webinar to help people figure out if the product was right for them, then created a LeadPages page for it. Ever since I’ve been using the countdown timer on webinar registration pages, my conversion rate has skyrocketed.

The LeadPages page created for a webinar.

After people sign up for the webinar, they’re redirected to a thank-you page, where I have a video that lets them know they are officially registered. This thank-you page also provides an opportunity for people to like my Facebook page, which helps me stay top of mind in the days leading up to the webinar.

The thank-you page gives people the opportunity to like your Facebook page.

As you know, I feel that Facebook marketing is the best platform for list building and specifically Facebook ads are extremely powerful. I drive all of my ads’ traffic to my LeadPages.

Another great thing about LeadPages is that the team is always innovating and offering more features. A couple of the newer features I love are LeadBoxes and LeadLinks.

LeadBoxes can be used on web pages and even in blog posts. To add them to a blog post, all I have to do is add a hyperlink to the post, and when someone clicks on it, a LeadBox pops up with an opportunity for someone to join my email list.

LeadLinks integrates your email service provider with your webinar provider. When you insert the link in an email and a person clicks on it, they’re automatically registered for your webinar and tagged in your email system. It’s a great thing to use for your existing email list because you don’t need to gather names and emails since you already have them.

The bottom line is that LeadPages is a tool that I can’t live without!

Amy Porterfield is the co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies and a social media strategist.

Who are these social media pros?

The social media marketing experts who contributed to this article are all speaking at Social Media Marketing World 2014.



You’ll hear from 80+ of the world’s top social media marketing pros as they reveal their newest social media marketing tips and practical, real-world, proven examples.

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What do you think? Do you use any of these social media tools? What’s working well for you today? Please share your thoughts in the box below