Social Media Roundup: Feb. 28, 2017

4 Useful Tools To Automate Your Social Media Efforts

We've always recommended that social media marketers adopt tools to help automate their work. Brands still need fresh, attractive content to feed their streams, but automation helps them find, organize, schedule, publish, and track effectiveness - while retaining their brand voice. Four useful tools recommended by Nathan Oulman (dailyhosting.net) on Social Media Explorer:

•  Jetpack, a plug-in for WordPress, is a Swiss Army knife's worth of social media sharing tools for your website.
•  Hootsuite, which he calls "a great way to manage the activity on your social media accounts from a single platform."
•  Feedly, an RSS aggregator that allows you read content on different websites without having to visit each separately.
•  Zapier provides easy ways to connect just about anything using the Internet to anything else that does: email, apps, RSS feeds, Google calendar... you name it, Zapier can probably provide the plumbing to make the connection.

5 Steps To Create a Social Media Audit

A social media audit will help you understand your customers better and ensure that you observe best practices. Two key points (of five) to consider from Kailee VanDamia, strategy director at Ignite Social Media:

• Don't just look at yourself - look at what your competition is doing, too. You're not operating in a vacuum. Your customers are likely to pay attention to your competitors, so don't get blindsided by unexpectedly successful social media campaigns by key competitors - and don't miss opportunities that may arise if they mess up.
• Re-evaluate your metrics regularly. Don't get stuck looking at the same things over and over and ignore other numbers that may be important to you.

6 Trends in Mobile Apps for 2017

As mobile apps heat up for marketers as a way to reach and engage with customers, the technology and its uses keep changing. And while larger or more innovative brands have made great strides, many others have a long way to go. For instance, "If you... do not already have a mobile strategy in the works, your New Year Resolution for 2017 should be to discover how to build an app for an affordable price," says Andrew Gazdecki, founder and CEO of Bizness Apps, writing on Socialmedia.biz. Among the trends he highlights are:

•  Augmented reality (AR). The huge success of Pokémon Go has led to widespread interest in AR. Watch for new and creative uses in 2017.
•  Apps will include artificial intelligence (AI) technology brand marketers can use to learn more about their users and how they interact with the apps (and the rest of the world).
•  The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the ability of non-human objects to communicate and interact across the public Internet with both other "Things" and with people (the clichéd example is a refrigerator that tells you when you're low on milk).

What Is the "Half-Life" of Your Brand's Tweets?

The idea of a half-life (the time it takes for the radioactivity of an isotope to fall to half its original value) is useful for thinking about how Twitter works for your brand. In a whimsical, educational essay, Lee Aase, "Chancellor" of Social Media University, Global (SMUG) - and by day director of the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network - says the half-life of a tweet is the point at which half of the people who will ever see a given tweet will have seen it. So if a tweet will be seen by 200 people, its half-life is the time it takes for the first 100 people to see it. To test his idea, he developed a test tweet and explains his methodology for determining its half-life. You might be interested in applying his findings to your own Twitter stream. For instance, if you're re-tweeting a promotion, the half-life of your tweets can tell you how often you need to re-post.

Daniel Lieberman helps companies, organizations, and individuals use the Internet to communicate, market, and brand themselves using the most up-to-date tools and techniques. Based in Shelburne Falls, Mass., he also is the founder and CEO of Spelt Gourmet, the home of creative wheat-free cooking. Visit danieljlieberman.com or contact him at 413-489-1818 or daniel@danieljlieberman.com.