The 7 Ultimate Tools forWordPress Social Media Promotion

Social media usage has been making big waves since its inception. Within the last 6 years it’s increased by 356%.  It’s even become a determining factor in search engine results! Needless to say, if you’re not promoting each and every piece of content you’re publishing to your WordPress, your marketing strategy is slipping. Running an Ecommerce business on your WordPress blogrequires you to wear many hats, one of which is the avid social networker. And when I say avid, I mean on a schedule.

You’ve got to be consistently sharing great content across multiple platforms to build a following. Once you have the following, the real work begins. You’ve got to keep them interested, track their interactions, and retarget them with the data you collect.  Obviously, this is no easy task. You’ve got to arm yourself with the operative arsenal to achieve all of your Social Media Marketing (SMM) goals. That’s where this handy list comes into play. Below, you will find  7 useful, usable, and utilitarian social media promotion tools specifically designed to simplify your SMM strategies and procedures.

Hootsuite 
Let’s begin with the familiar. Hootsuite is an extremely popular and powerful social media management tool. It’s a turnkey SMM solution which allows users to view data streams from multiple social networks at once, and also to send messages across different platforms. You can even auto-update your different social media outlets with your RSS feed. Hootsuite integrates with: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace, Foursquare and a Japanese social network called Mixi. You can conglomerate any 5 of these platforms onto a single streamlined dashboard to track campaigns, write messages, and schedule posts, and so on — for free in most cases. The main selling point is the clean interface which makes organizing and analyzing the data from all your social accounts much easier than shifting through multiple tabs or windows. You can also assign workflows and collaborate with other users, making Hootsuite a very convenient business solution. Hootsuite’s analytics reports usually cost around $50 per in depth report, which is pretty pricey for smaller businesses. Though there are a few reports you can procure at no cost. These include social mentions and other brand awareness metrics, which can be very helpful when trying to expand your SMM efforts.

Lucky Orange
Some social promotion tactics are far more intimate than others. Lucky Orange certainly falls into the former ategory and as one might expect, all interaction is seriously data driven. This tool allows you to view real-time visitor activity on your WordPress site in an insane degree of depth. If Hootsuite is social, then Lucky Orange is up close and personal. You can monitor all of the following: Clicks,Visitor opinions with customizable polls, Movements, Scrolling activity, Heat maps, Even page/cart abandonment. Needless to say, you can get a feel for your visitor’s behavior with this tool. And once you understand their browsing habits, you can actually initiate direct conversation via a live chat function. Of course, if you find that to be too intrusive, you can always leave a fully customizable chat box for the visitor to click on at will, and if you’re unavailable for live chat, the box will automatically revert to a contact form. You can also monitor an individual visitor’s traffic source in real-time and record the results, thus giving you an accurate idea of how much traffic is coming in due to social promotions exclusively. This way you can match visitor behavior with traffic sources and build powerful insights into all of your marketing efforts.
Lucky Orange is a truly deep analytics tool that allows you to get a very personal view of who your visitors are and where their interests lie. Still, this tool focuses more on individual interactions (which are important, no doubt), but social networking is more about the big picture. So our next tool brings the broad view back into focus.

Pocket
One SMM strategy that nearly all savvy marketers adhere to is the 80-20 rule. This rule states that a mere 20% of your social media content should be self-aggrandizing, and for that matter: self-produced. The vast majority of the content you distribute across social media should be curated. This idea helps you boost credibility within your niche, make valuable contacts with other social media power users, and it provides a valuable/informative service to your various fans and followers.Unfortunately, that means you’ve got to spend time scouring the web for authoritative, interesting, and entertaining content. Consequently, you’ll be crowding your browser’s bookmarks folder. It’d be nice if you had a web application that could help you manage and redistribute your content library so you can quickly and easily choose the best content to redistribute. The web application, Pocket, does exactly that. Pocket is a tool that helps you gather useful/intriguing content for either personal or professional perusal. This app makes content gathering clean and easy. Simply save anything that seems interesting across the more than 500 different applications and many of the most popular platforms, with which Pocket is invariably compatible, and read through it later at your leisure. Once you’ve read a content piece, it disappears from your cache, making certain your interface is never too crowded. Transient bookmarks, unrivaled compatibility, and a clean management interface make Pocket the ultimate content aggregating application.

Click To Tweet and CoSchedule
Click To Tweet is a very simple, yet supremely effective WordPress plugin that enables you to create boxes within blog posts which can be shared via Twitter with a single click. When writing blog posts, there’s always one line or another that’s just supremely quotable, and therefore extremely shareable as well. Highlight these bits of catchy text or customized messages with an attractive box so that your users can quickly and easily share your content.
Click-To-Tweet is a free plugin by CoSchedule, which is really an effective SMM tool all its own. It acts as a comprehensive content marketing editorial calendar for your WordPress. The interface works via easy drag and drop styled calendar management, and it’s filled with organized workflow features like scheduled tasks and auto reminders. It even publishes your posts on a schedule. CoSchedule helps you stay on top of all your content marketing efforts.

Highlight and Share
Along the same lines as Click To Tweet, Highlight and Share takes the idea a step further. Sometimes the lines in your content that you think stick out the most don’t necessarily resonate with your readers. How about you let them decide what’s worth sharing instead?
Highlight and Share is a WordPress plugin that allows your visitors to quickly and easily tweet or share whatever section of your blog post they like, simply by– you guessed it—highlighting a section of text. Of course, whenever a user shares a part of your text, you get a backlink and a free shout out to your Twitter handle. This serves as a dual benefit: it allows your users a greater degree of control while they focus more on your content, and it simultaneously exposes your brand to a greater audience, providing them with direct access to your content and website. Plus, it’s just plain novel. Not a lot of blogs have it, so yours will stand out all the more.

Social Contests
The fantastic thing about so many of these plugins is their self-explanatory titles. As you might guess, this plugin creates easily shareable contests, promotions, and landing pages that you launch from the platform of your choice, including: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Your WordPress site and Email. Social contests is a really comprehensive plugin. It allows you to gain email addresses, keep track of social impressions such as “likes” or “follows,” drive traffic to your website with the voting function in the polls, easily integrate with Facebook Ads Tool by Wishpond, and run a variety of different contests, sweepstakes, and other promotional offers.
One major strike against this app is it requires a subscription to the Wishpond service, however, it also offers you a free 2 week trial with which to decide if it’s worth it. Either way, it’s got some powerful functionality that allows for promotional deals, lead gathering, and analytic data as well. Certainly worth checking out.

SNAP
We saved the best for last as we take a look at SNAP, otherwise known as Social Networks Auto Poster. This is one more of those self-explanatory names, but for the sake of finality, we’ll go over it anyway. SNAP allows you to automate your sharing of content, messages, announcements, and so forth across more social networks than any other single app.
It’s one of the few that integrates well with Google+, which is far and away the most important social network in terms of improving your search rankings. It can even post to YouTube for your video content. Just take a look at the compendium of supported networks that SNAP has to its credit. This plugin is lightweight and usable. Moreover, it’s one of the very few that actually reaches all of the most relevant social networking platforms, and also has an easily navigable interface.

What are some of your favorite social promotion tools? Sound off in the comments.