Most Used 22 Social Media Marketing Management Tools

With every online marketing channel and discipline, there must be tools to make the task of marketing more efficient and effective. Social Media Marketing is no different. Over the past 6-9 months, I’ve been researching and reviewing a variety of social media management tools that help with everything from source network connections to campaign & social content management to monitoring & measurement. While there numerous tools that manage single platforms (like Twitter) this list includes services that manage multiple social network accounts, content and measurement.

At some point we’ll do more with individual reviews, but in the meantime, here is a list of 22 different social media marketing management tools, platforms and services to help manage and scale your online marketing efforts on the social web:

Shoutlet – Manages social media marketing communications with one platform for building, engaging and measuring social media. Includes multiple account and platform support, social CRM and ecommerce for Facebook, email marketing and mobile features.

Direct Message Lab – Provides consulting, implementation and a platform (REACH) for centralized management of social media promotions & contests, advertising and measurement.

Objective Marketer – Offers social media marketing and analytics with integrated campaign management (Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, YouTube), multi-channel execution, engagement reports and user management.

Wildfire Interactive – Platform for easy creation, implementation and management of branded interactive campaigns including: sweepstakes, contests and give-aways.

StrongMail Social Studio – Comprehensive social media marketing platform with a referral marketing platform, social sharing tool and campaign management application. (Disclosure: StrongMail is a TopRank client)

Sprout – Cloud-based visual authoring software used to build interactive Engage Ads and Engage Apps that deliver rich, interactive, and social content across the web and mobile devices.

Spredfast - Enterprise social media management system that allows an organization to manage, monitor, and measure its voices across multiple social media channels. Also offers a white label option for agencies.

socialTALK – allows brands to create (text, photos, videos), manage (customize workflow & approval process), publish (single source, scheduled publishing to multiple platforms) and measure (aggregated analytics dashboard) their content strategy and posting schedule.

Crowd Factory – Suite of social media marketing tools include Social Campaign, that enables marketers to acquire new customers through simple social gestures and custom social marketing campaigns while easily tracking ROI.

Awareness - Social marketing hub that centralizes social media content publishing, management, measurement and engagement. Also includes access to 7 white-labeled, best practice social networking applications.

@this moment – Built on the @this moment platform, DEC is a system for managing a brand’s presence across multiple online environments combining multimedia UGC, and a variety of real-time inputs which are distributed across social platforms including YouTube Brand Channels, Facebook Fan Pages, MySpace Brand Communities & the iPhone.

MediaFunnel – Offers a Business Social Media platform for Facebook and Twitter supporting multiple users per profile and editorial review. Includes monitoring and integrates withSalesforce.com.

Virtue – Works with clients and agencies through a Social Relationship Management (SEM) platform offering Facebook tabs & applications, a publishing feature for Facebook & Twitter and mobile solutions.

Sprinklr – Social media marketing platform and consulting services for consumer & B2B marketers as well as agencies. Provides social media audience research, acquisition, content promotion and measurement tools.

Janrain – Web based platform of tools including: Engage to make it easy for users to connect a site with their social networks, Federate to facilitate navigation across multiple web properties & partner sites with a single log-in (currently supports 16 networks), Capture to leverage user data for personalized experiences.

Sprout Social – Affordable social media dashboard, monitoring, team workflow, influencer and contact management, performance metrics and daily or weekly email summaries. Supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and Foursquare.

Sendible – Social media marketing platform that supports 30+ networks & services offering management of: accounts/profiles, messages & content, social contacts, content discovery, engagement, blog content & promotion, monitoring and analytics. Also offers a white label version for agencies.

KickApps – Self service social media web site authoring and social content management system system supporting video, social networking, social graph & activity streams, apps & analytics. Enables web publishers and marketers to develop branded communities, social applications and interactive widgets on their websites and across the social web. Solutions for small and large business.

Postling – Local business social media marketing platform to create content, stay organized and reach customers. Currently free for small business or personal use.

pop.to Social Marketing –  A social marketing suite, including feed-enabled social gestures and widgets, social dashboard, segmentation tools, influencer identification, conversion tracking and built-in friend casting.

HootSuite - Social media dashboard for managing social content and engagement on multiple networks with team workflow and statistics.

Seesmic – Web and desktop tools to manage social marketing activity on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google Buzz and Linkedin plus a plug-in marketplace for more social management options.

This list of social media marketing platforms & services “ad hoc” was compiled by bookmarking various services as they were discovered or pitched to us (we don’t reply to pitches).  Here’s another useful list of SMMS was compiled in March 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang.

What social media marketing dashboards, software and management tools from the list above have you tested or use? Reviews, observations, insights and questions are greatly appreciated!

Obviously, tools are only as good as the expertise of the people using them, so Top Rank Marketing is always interested in helping companies develop their social media roadmap and recommend the right supporting software for implementation.

How to Generate More Leads From Your Website 5 Easy Tricks

Conversions are a common problem with online sales: you can drive leads (traffic) to your site, but you can’t convert them to sales. This leaves you wondering what’s going on, what are you doing wrong, or if there is something wrong with the product or service you are trying to sell. Chances are, there isn’t anything wrong with your product or service; rather, there is a problem with your site and its lead conversion optimization.

Here are 5 tricks to generate more leads from your website and to help you optimize conversions on your leads.

1. Make sure you have a visible and clickable phone number on your mobile site. This is crucial, because at least 80% of the consumers in your market are using their smartphones to shop. When someone shops online using their smartphone, they are 70% likely to take some sort of online action within an hour, so you want to make sure they are able to take action on your product or service. Having a visible and clickable phone number means they can just click or tap the number, and call you to place their order!

2. Remove any unnecessary opt-in fields. No-Risk SEO was able to improve their client conversion by 60.18% by removing opt-in fields that weren’t necessary. People don’t want to fill out a bunch of fields to get information about your product; they want to do as little as possible and get as much information as possible. By removing fields you really don’t need, you will ensure your shoppers are more likely to convert from leads to sales.

3. Have your opt-in form on the landing page, rather than a Call To Action that leads to an opt-in form.If you really want to have your customers opt in to your service or product, make it as easy for them as possible. Every click is a barrier to converting a lead to a sale, so you want to remove as many barriers as you can.

4. Have Testimonials “Above the Fold”. More than 70% of Americans have stated that they look for product reviews before they make a purchase, and nearly 63% of consumers indicate that they are more likely to purchase from a website with product reviews and ratings. Have your testimonials near the top of your site, so people can readily see how great your product is.

5. The More Landing Pages the Better. In a survey of 4,000 lead generation businesses, those businesses with 31 to 40 landing pages generated seven times more leads than those with only 1 to 5 landing pages. Businesses with more than 40 landing pages? Those businesses generated twelve times more sales than businesses with only 1 to 5 landing pages.

These 5 tricks to generate more leads from your website will help you convert your leads into sales, meaning more profit for you. Ignoring these five basics can mean the difference between someone just visiting your site and someone visiting your site and then making a purchase. Remember, too, that you have no more than 8 seconds to grab your consumer’s attention and compel them to purchase your service—after an average of 8 seconds, most visitors will leave a site and move on to another one.

Please leave a comment below if you have any other important tips to generate more leads from a website.

Top 10 Common SEO Mistakes People Do And How To Fix them

Are you one of those business owners who think they have the perfect website, but can’t get the traffic you need to drive leads and sales? Or not matter what you try you can’t rank on Google? Let me tell you, even the most spectacular websites suffer from some very common SEO mistakes that are amazingly easy to fix. These mistakes are not only easy to fix, but they’re also easy to identify, using this free SEO audit tool. In less that 45 seconds we can provide you a free website audit specifically for the pages you want to rank for. Once you evaluate your audit you can make the changes below. Here are the most common SEO mistakes, and what you can do to fix them:

1) Is Your Website Page Title Too Long?

If your page title is longer than 70 characters, it’s far too long. The page title is the text that is displayed at the top of your browser window or on your browser tab, and it’s also the title of the page shown in Google search results. The page title tells people what your page is about, and if the title is too long it can get cut off by the search engines and browsers.

From an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) standpoint, keeping your page title short maintains the importance of each term in the title. If your page title is too long, though, you end up diluting the importance of each term, which can harm your search engine ranking.

To fix this, write up with a brief (but keyword-rich) description of your page that is less than 70 characters long, and make that your page title. You can then download the best SEO plugin for WordPress to easily enter in your title.

2) Page Title Does Not Target Realistic Keywords

One of the most important factors in search engine rankings is how closely the page title matches the user’s search terms. If your page title is written too much like an advertisement, you probably will find that the keywords you use aren’t the words users are likely to search for. You should avoid unnecessary descriptive words in your page title, because users don’t search for those.

To fix this, think about keywords or use a keyword search tool to find out what words users might actually use to find you. Adjust your title to remain readable, but to more closely match the keywords that users are actually going to use. For example, if you provide a service, on that service page of your website the title should read: (your service) | (name of company or comparable service).

3) Is My Meta Description Too Long?

The meta description of your page is the text that shows up under your page title in search results. These descriptions can get cut off if they are too long, usually more than 150 characters. To avoid having your descriptive text cut off by the search engines, you should make sure your meta description is short enough to fit into 150 characters or less.

To fix this, you should develop a meta description that gives important details not included in your page title, but is still a description that is less than 150 characters long. This goes in the same place you enter your title inside the page within WordPress.

4) Should Each Page Have A New Keyword?

Each page within your website is a new chance to get found in the vastness of the Internet. You should have different page titles and internal page keywords for all of your different pages, to make the most of these opportunities.

To fix this, develop a list of different keywords for each page. Figure out what each page offers that is different from the other pages, and target your keywords to highlight what each individual page can offer. Make sure to use the keyword search tool to ensure that keyword is getting enough searches with low competition.

5) When Should I Renew My Domain?

When your domain name is registered for the next few years, that shows that you are committed to staying in business. Search engines favor that, because it shows that your page is less likely to be spammy and a “fly by night” operation. By having your domain registration last for the next few years, you’ll get a good SEO boost and your pages will be more likely to rank higher in search engine results pages.

To fix this, spend the extra money now to register your domain for the next 2-3 years. This should not cost you more than $30-$45.

6) Are You Using CSS And HTML Correctly?

I understand this might be a little technical, but it is very important to understand for every business owner. In good web design, your HTML will only be the content of your page, with references to CSS for the layout. Pages that have layout-related information in their HTML prevent the search engines from being able to find the most relevant keywords and other information from your pages. This means that your keyword research doesn’t pay off as much, because your page is overloaded with stylistic HTML instead of putting all of the styling and layout commands in CSS.

To fix this, put all of your layout-related code in CSS. Remove it from your HTML entirely, and focus your HTML on content. WordPress has a great structure to help with this.

7) ALT Tags For Images Can Boost SEO

The search engines cannot actually “read” your images; they scan for text. With the ALT tag, you can associate your images with text, providing a bit more keyword usage to your page. ALT text does not carry the same weight on page rankings as the actual text on the page, but it’s worth including.

To fix this, you should assign ALT text to all of your pictures. This helps SEO and also makes your page more screen reader friendly! If you are using WordPress, this takes less than 10 seconds.

As you can see in the image above, my alt text for this specific blog post is common SEO mistakes which is the main keyword I would like to eventually rank this article for. If you are not using WordPress you can change the ALT text inside the HTML using FTP to open each pages HTML file.

8) Is My Conversion Form Too Long?

This is the biggest mistake website owners make! You can quickly increase your websites conversion rate with forms by asking for less information. Only ask for what you need immediately to get started with the potential customer. Is your conversion form asking your users for all of their personal information, including their shoe size and Social Security Number? A conversion form is great for getting leads, but your form has to be done right if you’re going to get the most conversions possible. Asking for too much information (like a full mailing address when all you really need is an email address) can drive people away from your form.

To fix this, think about what information you actually need. If all you need is the name and email address, just ask for those pieces of information. I’ve learned that for a lead generation form, name, email, and phone number, and “maybe” adding message is enough. If you really need much more information you can set up your form in 3 steps to entice the user to finish the form.

9) Does My Website Have Too Little (Or Too Much) Text?

Search engines focus on text more than anything else, so it’s important to actually have text on your page. This is true, as most people know, but it’s important to not try to cram too much text into a page. When you have too much text on your page, search engines have a hard time extracting the relevant text.

To fix this, make sure your page is readable and only contains the text you need. Don’t insert unimportant text just to put more copy on the page; use your relevant keywords and additional words necessary to make the page readable without becoming too cluttered with text. 2k words or less is a good landmark.

10) Is Analytics For My Website Important?

Once you’ve created your site, optimized it, and converted your traffic into leads, the job’s not over. To make the most of your website, you should analyze your results and then tweak your SEO strategy accordingly.

To fix this, install and use an analytics program. This will help you see how well your pages are performing, and tweak your SEO to eke even more success out of your page. Googles Free Analytics tool is an excellent start.

Did you find these common SEO mistakes and fixes helpful? Let us know any changes you have made or feel free to ask any additional questions in the comments. Share with someone you believe this can help too!

Author:This post is originally posted by Richie Contartesi

Best Free SEO Tools for Blogger in 2015, Every one should know !!

Aside from a nice-looking website with interesting and regularly updated content, SEO is essential to bloggers. While it’s entirely possible to do SEO on your own, due to the complexity of SEO rules to adhere to, it’s probably a lot more efficient to fall back on tools out there that are primed for helping your site rank higher.

Whether it’s full-featured toolsets, keyword suggestion engines or very specific site crawlers and link checkers, there’s a huge number of tools and services out there that can help you improve your blog’s SEO.

In this post, we are listing our 5 favorite SEO tools you can use for free, and if that is not doing it for you, there is a second list of 15 more tools to try out at the second part of the post.

Recommended Reading: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Ins and Outs

My Favourite 5

1. Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is one of the most advanced and complete SEO services on the market, focusing specifically on link intelligence and domain-based metrics. The tools it has to offer include the Site Explorer, Backlink History tool, Keyword Checker, Comparator and a Clique Hunter. The comparative tools require a paid subscription, but the free account is enough if you’re only interested in your own blog(s).

2. IIS SEO Toolkit

The IIS SEO Toolkit has Site Analysis, Robots Exclusion, Sitemaps and Site Index modules. The Site Analysis module has a full-featured crawler engine as well as a Query Builder interface to generate custom reports. The Robots Exclusion module shows robots’ content and lets you set "allow" and "disallow" paths, while the Sitemaps and Site Index module lets you view, edit and delete sitemap and site index files.

3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is an extensive website crawling tool that will help you analyze and audit your website for maximum search engine optimization. The SEO Spider checks your website’s links, CSS, scripts, images and apps to identify problems such as duplicate pages, broken links, URI issues and redirect errors.

4. Google Keyword Planner

Since most of your traffic is probably going to come from Google searches, you’ll definitely want to take a look at Google’s new Keyword Planner. Google’s Keyword Planner provides a wealth of information on currently popular keywords that you can further fine tune withadvanced filtering options. Keyword Planner also has a historical view, letting you see thepopularity of keywords over a twelve-month period.

5. Virante SEO Tools

Virante offers a number of on-site and off-site SEO tools for free on their website. On-site tools include a Duplicate Content Tool, an LDA Content Optimizer and a Density of Keyword Tool. Amongst the off-site tools are a Competitive Analysis Tool, a Link Atrophy Tool and a PageRank Recovery Tool. Virante also offer miscellaneous tools like a Clean IP Tool and a HTTP Header Check Tool.

More SEO Tools

It’s always good to have more choices. Here are 15 more SEO tools that bloggers can use for free. Let us know your favorite in the comments.

Web CEO

Web CEO is a complete SEO tool that comes in both online and offline versions. Like most SEO tools of this type, Web CEO has features such as rank checking, link management and analysis as well as on-site opitmization tools such as a Site Auditor that can scan your blog for broken links and other SEO-damaging errors. Web CEO operates on a freemium model.

SEO Book Tools

SEO Book has a number of free SEO tools available on their website. Just register a free account and you’ll be able to use tools such as their Keyword List Generator, Meta Tag Generator, Server Header Checker and Link Suggestion Checker, all for free. You can alsodownload Firefox extensions such as their SEO Toolbar that provides competitive and search data directly in Firefox.

SEOgadget Tools

SEOgadget provides a number of free SEO tools to help you with your SEO efforts. Some of the tools SEOgadget provide include a Link Categorization Tool for Excel, a Content Strategy Generator, Anchor Text Tool as well as a SEOgadget for Excel tool that allows you tointerpret data from services such as Majestic SEO in Excel.

SEER’s SEO Toolbox

SEER’s SEO Toolbox is an all-in-one spreadsheet-based SEO toolbox that can be used to analyse data from sources such as Google Analytics, Majestic SEO and Twitter. It also has some on-page analysis tools and scraping abilities as well. Since it’s an online spreadsheet, your whole team (if you have one) can work on and analyse the data together.

Internet Marketing Ninjas SEO Tools

The Internet Marketing Ninjas have more than a few free SEO, Webmaster and Social Tools on their website. Some of the SEO Tools include a Page Speed Tool, a Robots Text Generator Tool, a Meta Tag Generator Tool and a Search Combination Tool.

SEO Tools For Excel

Niels Bosma’s SEO Tools For Excel is an Excel add-on that adds a number of SEO-centric features. Some of the functions added by SEO Tools For Excel include the ability to find duplicated content, check backlinks and obtain WhoIs data. SEO Tools For Excel can also analyse information such as the number of links and the meta keywords on your site.

SEO Site Tools (Chrome Extension)

This is a Google Chrome extension that adds on-page SEO data drawn from various websites and services. It provides aggregated data from Google PageRank, Alexa traffic details, Quancast rank and Dmoz domain presence. It also provides information on meta tags, social media reactions and can even make suggestions to improve your site’s SEO.

SEOquake

SEOquake is an SEO plugin for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. SEOquake provides a wealth of information essential to any blogger looking to improve their site’s ranking, including information on Yahoo! Backlinks, Google page rank, Google and Bing indexing, WhoIs data and keyword density reports. It can also generate full page reportsfor any site you wish.

Moz SEO Toolbar

The Moz SEO Toolbar is available for both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. It gives you access to typical SEO metrics in real-time as you browse the Internet. It can also highlight links and keywords on websites, as well as show all the page elements on a given website. It also has a detailed search engine results page (SERP) overlay that lets you compare Google, Bing and Yahoo! metrics.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer is a tool that you can use to investigate backlinks (both dofollow and nofollow links) on both your blog as well as competitor’s blogs. Open Site Explorer also provides domain and page authority rankings. The free version limits you to 200 backlinks per report, with detailed information is only available for the first five backlinks, but that should be enough for a basic overview.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a keyword suggestion tool that suggests common sense keyword phrasesbased on Google’s own suggestion engine. Simply key in a query or keyword and Ubersuggest will provide a list of suggested keyword phrases based on your initial input. Ubersuggest can also be told to base suggestions on specific Google services such as Google Images, Google Video and Google News.

Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool

This tool helps you optimize your pages’ title and meta description tags in order to maximise the appeal of your websites when seen in Google search result listings. It’s a simple tool that generates a preview of the Google SERP so that you can make sure that your and meta description tags don’t exceed the optimal length.

Browseo

Browseo is a quick and simple web app that lets you look at websites as a search engine would. This lets you view your blog purely from an SEO perspective quickly, without having to dig into the code. The best thing is that there are also Android and iOS versions, so you can check your blog’s SEO optimization on the go.

Anchor Text Over Optimization Report

This simple web service checks your site for any over optimized anchor text that may result in your site falling foul of Google’s search algorithms. Just input your site’s URL and the service will generate a list of keywords and keyword phrases with measurements on how optimized or over optimized these keywords are.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is an essential tool to check for broken links on your website, including partial checking of FTP, Gopher and e-mail links. The app also supports re-checking of links, SSL websites and can also detect and report redirected URLs. Xenu’s Link Sleuth can generate a simple report of all the issues it finds as well as generate a sitemap.

Read related article:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Ins and Outs
Social Media Marketing What's and Why