Social Media Tools Archives - Christiankonline.com

20+ Ways to Use Apple Watch for Social Media to Get More Done!

Do you spend a lot of time pulling out your iPhone to check your social media channels?

Maybe you’re managing social media for clients or constantly checking your own channels for new updates.

We’re all guilty of that.

The bottomline is that social media can be time-consuming and interrupt our focus if we let it.

This can lead to a loss in productivity and if you’re a business owner, lost revenue.

What if you could improve the time you spend on social media each day?

For example, spend 60 minutes a day instead of getting lost for hours in your newsfeed?

In this article I’ll show you some ways you can use Apple Watch for social media.

This way you can begin to improve your productivity and accomplish more in your business.

Are you struggling with your social media marketing? Apple Watch can help you stay on-top of your game. Here’s how.Click To Tweet

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can use Apple Watch for social media.

This way you can stay on-top of conversations, capitalize on new content ideas, and get more done on your social media channels!

20+ Ways to Use Apple Watch for Social Media

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How to Boost Your Social Shares Immediately With the Social Warfare Plugin

Would you like to get more social shares on your blog?

While there’s no shortage of social media sharing plugins to add sharing buttons to your blog or website, how do you know which one you should use?

Most of them are very basic, can cause your site to run slow, and offer limited functionality.

In this article, I’m going to review the Social Warfare Plugin.

You’ll learn why it’s different from other social plugins and how it can actually help you increase shares almost immediately on your site and so much more!

What is the Social Warfare Plugin?

The Social Warfare Plugin is a beautiful and feature-rich WordPress plugin that adds responsive share buttons and total share counts to your site in seconds all without needing to edit any code.

It was created by Dustin Stout, Jason Wiser, and Nicholas Cardot, three guy’s with a strong background in visual design which is reflected in the Social Warfare plugin’s design.

Example of the Social Warfare plugin once it is installed

In addition to being able to quickly add sharing buttons to your site, the Social Warfare plugin is unique because they’ve also included other powerful features such as click-to-tweet and the ability to upload an image for use on Pinterest.

Typically, you have to pay for these two features separately. Social Warfare has included both of them in their plugin.

Example of click-to-tweet

Example of Pinterest image optimization

Let’s take a look at the Social Warfare plugin and see just how well it works.

A Review of the Social Warfare Plugin

Continue reading How to Boost Your Social Shares Immediately With the Social Warfare Plugin

5 Tools to Create Images for Social Media People Love

Would you like to create better images for social media?

Studies have shown that we favor visual learning.

Even Facebook posts with a photo accounted for 87% of total interactions.

But what do you do if you’re not a graphic designer and you want to create visually stunning images for your social media posts?

This article is going to teach you about tools you can use to create images for social media.

Not only will they be high quality and look professional, you can do them yourself!

Why is it so difficult to create images?

In order to create great visuals to go along with your content, you used to have a background in graphic design.

This meant knowing how to use a complex program such as Adobe Photoshop or another graphics program.

Today, modern marketing has evolved.

You no longer need to rely on a designer.

But you’re now expected to be able to create these visuals yourself.

In most cases, most most social media managers are given dimensions to use on social media or a Facebook image size cheat sheet to work with.

But how do you create images that look great without a background in graphic design?

Fortunately, there are a lot of great tools available to help you create images for social media.

In no particular order, here are five of my favorite tools for creating graphics.

Tool to create images for social media Continue reading 5 Tools to Create Images for Social Media People Love

5 Ways to Add Social Media Sharing Plugins For Easier Sharing

Do you wish your blog or website received more traffic?

While you can try and figure out how Google works, that’s a bit of a mystery.

You can also find many SEO tips that can teach you how to improve your writing and boost your search ranking to bring people back to your site.

But not all of us are SEO experts nor do we have the time to optimize our content properly.

An easier way is to use social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to help amplify your content, reach more people, and drive them back to your site.

A quick way to add these social networks to your site is to use social media sharing plugins.

In this article, I’m going to share with you five of my favorite social media sharing plugins that you can add to your site right now.

What are social media sharing plugins?

If you’re not a coder, you’ll appreciate using social media sharing plugins.

They let you add a list of social media channels to your blog or website without touching a line of code.

Added using social media sharing plugins like Flare

This way your readers can easily share your content on their favorite social networks.

What’s great is that you can add them to your site in just a few minutes and start to generate leads using social media.

Why do I need social media buttons on my site?

Not making it easy for readers to share your content is a missed opportunity. Here’s why.

Click To Tweet

You can have them copy the URL and then go to their favorite site to share your content, but that takes too many steps.

It is important to make it as easy as possible for them to share your content.

This can save them time and help amplify your content to their audience, leading to more traffic back to your site!

While there are lots of ways to add social media buttons, you could spend hours deciding which one you should add.

Having tried many of the social sharing plugins, I put together a list of my favorite ones.

Let’s take a look at my favorite plugins for sharing your content on social media channels.

5 Social Media Sharing Plugins For Easier Sharing

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3 Hyper Alerts alternatives to keep tabs on your Facebook Pages

Do you wish you could get better Facebook notifications?

What if that tool could also notify you about Facebook posts from competitors? How about tweets as well?

Today I am going to teach you about three Hyper Alerts alternatives.

These social media tools can help you see notifications from Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts.

Hyper Alerts is going away. Try these 3 alternatives for managing Facebook notifications to replace it.

Click To Tweet

What I love about Hyper Alerts

For those of you who read my blog, I’ve written quite a lot about my love for Hyper Alerts here and here.

Because Facebook notifications are not always reliable, you could spend a lot of time going back to Facebook Pages you manage to see if you missed anything throughout the day.

Where Hyper Alerts really helped, you could be notified by email when new updates were made to your pages.

This could be sent each time a new notification was made to a page or you could choose to receive one email per day or one per week.

This way you don’t miss updates on Facebook.

Watching competitors with Hyper Alerts

Besides being able to see notifications about your own pages as well as tweets you sent.

Hyper Alerts can also help businesses in other ways.

See what your competitors are doing
Identify new content to share
Identify gaps in your social media strategy

Why look for Hyper Alerts alternatives?

While Hyper Alerts sounds like an amazing tool, they recently announced they were shutting down. Bummer!

While they also mentioned they would be making Hyper Alerts open source, not everyone has the time or skill to build their own social media tool.

A lot of community managers want something they can use out of the box.

Hyperalerts was one of those tools.

Because of this change, I spent some time looking for Hyper Alerts alternatives and put together a list for you.

3 Hyper Alerts alternatives

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10 Animated GIF tools to help excite your audience

How many of you have seen animated GIFs on Google+ and Tumblr?

While animated GIFs aren’t new, (they’ve been around since the 90s), many social networks are starting to allow them to be shared.

Recently, Twitter added support for animated GIFS like Google+ and Tumblr.

Here’s an example:

Starting today, you can share and view animated GIFs on http://t.co/wJD8Fp317i, Android and iPhone. http://t.co/XBrAbOm4Ya
<— Twitter Support (@Support) June 18, 2014

Note: According to TechCrunch, Twitter is converting animated GIFs.

This is great news if you are a Twitter user.

Now you can now include others types of media in your tweets besides just text.

Here are some examples:

Videos
Twitter cards
Animated GIFs

By incorporating animated GIFs into your messages, you can make them more engaging for your audience and help get across a point better.

For example, instead of including a written tutorial, you can simply link off to an animated GIF!

So how do you create your own animated GIFs?

To help you learn how to create your own animated GIFs, I put together my favorite animated GIF tools.

10 Animated GIF tools

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5 Hashtag tracking tools to help track and measure social media performance

How many of you are use hashtag tracking tools to help you identify and plan out your social media campaigns?

Recently, I was giving a presentation on how to leverage hashtags and spent a lot of time answering questions from people wanting to know if there were social media tools to help identify which hashtags they needed to include.

In this article, I am going to cover five hashtag tracking tools you can use to find the right hashtags to use with your social media campaigns.

What are hashtags?

For those of you new to hashtags, hashtags are a way to group conversations together.

For example, I conveniently use the hashtag #AskCK to make it easier for users on Twitter to ask me questions.

This also makes it easier for me to track the conversation by simply clicking on the hashtag.

Hashtags are also very useful when you want to insert your information into other larger conversations.

An example of this is using the hashtag #BizTips when sharing updates that are business related or using #Socialmedia when sharing content that is social media related.

Benefits of using hashtags

As I mentioned, by including hashtags in your discussions, it makes it easier for people to follow the discussion that is taking place.

For example, many events create their own hashtag so that attendees can see who is saying what at an event.

If they did not include hashtags, it would be difficult to follow all of the conversations taking place.

The same holds true when trying to measure how effective your social media campaigns were.

Imagine having to go through thousands of conversations. By including a hashtag, you can quickly filter the conversations to only show conversations using a specific hashtag.

This way you can quickly see the conversations and measure your performance.

5 Hashtag tracking tools

Now that you are aware of what hashtags are, how do you identify which hashtags you should be using in your social media campaigns?

Fortunately, there are a number of hashtag tracking tools you can use to help identify, analyze, and measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign.

Continue reading 5 Hashtag tracking tools to help track and measure social media performance

25 Social media tools to help grow your brand

Do you find it challenging to know which social media tools to add to your social media toolbox?

There are literally thousands of tools to choose from.

How do you decide which social media tools you need to help with your social media efforts?

Today I’m going to cover 25 social media tools you need to be using to help you grow your brand.

Aren’t all social media tools the same?

When using social media to grow your business, you can’t just focus on knowing how to use the networks.

That’s important; however, if that is all you focus on, you will spend a lot of time just learning the mechanics and not really know if you are making an impact when you post content.

This is where it is important to have a few social media tools available to help you quickly figure out this information.

To help you out, this list of 25 social media tools is broken down into the following categories.

1. Social listening tools

Social media tools to help your business learn about conversations happening about your brand, your competitors, and keywords.

2. Social conversation tools

Tools to help you locate and respond to customer inquiries and comments.

3. Social marketing tools

Tools to help you create campaigns and contests for your business.

4. Social analytics tools

Tools to help your business measure and analyze the performance of your social media marketing efforts.

5. Social influencer tools

Tools to help identify social media influencers.

Now that you know how the social media tools are broken down, let’s take a look at 25 of the best social media tools.

25 Social Media tools

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