Start Me Up! A profile of Buffer
If you read my blog post about new tools for Twitter users then you may already be aware of Buffer, a fine productivity app that helps me to schedule the content I choose to share on Twitter. It's well worth a look.
I caught up with co-founder Leo Widrich, who focuses on customer experience and support at Buffer. He is also the marketing head who works on spreading the word about Buffer through blogging, social media and "other forms of hustle".
How to be a formidable content curator: a 17-step guide
Over the past few years I must have heard the phrase ‘everyone is a publisher nowadays’ a thousand times or more. It’s largely accurate, due to the rise of social media, but I think we are mainly ‘curators’, as opposed to ‘publishers’.
Content curation is something that many of us will be familiar with, even if we don’t think of ourselves as curators. We instinctively find and share interesting content with our personal and professional networks. We follow others who share the kind of links that engage and entertain.
Yesterday the clearly charming Adam Vincenzini described my Twitter feed as "all killer and no filler". I know perfectly well that a bunch of my tweets can be filed under ‘utter rubbish’, but I must be doing something right.
As such here are my 17 tips to help you become even better at content curation, with one eye on Twitter, my platform of choice for sharing.
Five useful new tools for Twitter's power users
For many of us Twitter is now a core part of our daily lives. Despite this there remains no sign of 'Twitter Pro', for professional users, though its API is used by developers to create the kind of tools that help us to manage our accounts more easily.
Many tools have emerged to plug gaps in Twitter's functionality, some of which we have written about in the past. So far this year I've started to use a few new ones, as highlighted below. Do check them out.
Seven tools that sort social networks by size
Before we start, let's just get one thing straight. Size isn’t everything.
Hear that social media ‘gurus’? It’s about quality not quantity, so if your follower count is in the tens of thousands but works out at a ratio of 1:1 - that doesn’t make you an influencer.
But sometimes, looking at the most followed/liked/loved on various networks is an interesting exercise. It often reflects the demographic of a network, shows the most popular content – and highlights at least some of the brands getting it right.
I’ve compiled some of the tools you can use to do this, all of which should be used with caution.
Introducing ‘Project Arachnid’: Econsultancy’s real-time data visualisation tool
Here at Econsultancy we’re big on data, and we believe that the best way for publishers to monetise their online audience is to properly evaluate visitors, just like the smarter retailers do. We’ve created a tool to show you how we’re trying to do this.
Called ‘Project Arachnid’, the tool is essentially a real-time visualisation of our website traffic. You can see new visitors arriving at the different sections of our website, represented by dots.
Facebook launches Ads API
The efficacy of Facebook advertising may still be yet to be determined for many advertisers, but that hasn't stopped brands from pouring big money into ads on the social network. With more than 750m users, Facebook is simply too appealing a platform to ignore.
When it comes to scaling ad campaigns on the social network, however, advertisers have had limited options. But that could soon be changing.
Eight tools and techniques to boost your link building efforts
There’s no question the difference between a successful search marketing campaign and one that fails is very rarely due to a lack of creativity or a naive strategy. Far more frequently it’s down to inefficiencies or wasted resources.
So what can you do to reduce those problems? Try and constantly improve things. Those changes are very rarely revolutions in your process, but just small refinements.
What follows are eight of those small refinements and improvements that I’ve made recently which I think have made me a better link builder.
Five free Twitter tools worth bookmarking
Earlier today I was asked a question in the office: “What’s that tool for checking out your follower velocity?”
The tool, which I couldn’t immediately remember, is TwitterCounter. It’s not the newest kid on the block but it’s something that we use every month or two, to benchmark our Twitter performance.
As such I thought I’d make a note of it by writing a quick reference post on Twitter tools, which features a few new ones that we’ve recently started to play with (or are about to).
How to extend your Twitter experience by using third party tools
Earlier today I wanted to locate a tweet from 13 October 2010. I happened to know the date, but not the precise Twitter URL of the tweet in question. It turns out that it is pretty much impossible to search for date-specific tweets on Twitter itself.
So I asked the question on Twitter and once again the glorious hive came to the rescue. All manner of wonderful workarounds and suggestions were fired back at me. Some worked, others didn’t, but within 10 minutes I’d found the random tweet I was looking for (despite throwing a few curveballs along the way).
Many of us are now fairly advanced Twitter users with our own personalised Tweetdeck or Hootsuite set ups, and our Twitpic and Yfrog accounts, but there are lots of other tools out there that can help us to enhance and optimise our Twitter experience. I thought I’d share a few of them with you...
How to find bloggers relevant to your business
We are on the verge of a blog outreach campaign, to support our PR, affiliate marketing, linkbuilding and brand goals. We want to share the love where possible, and to hopefully receive a bit back.
Cultivating relationships with bloggers is vital for any serious brand marketer. They can be a real asset to help you spread word about content, products and services. They are more likely to link to you than mainstream media sites and they often link in the right way.
I’ll try to shine some light on the tools you can use to unearth the most relevant blogs to your business. You’ll find that there are many bloggers out there that will be receptive to working with you, you just need to know how to seek them out.
