4 Current SEO Copywriting Tips to Help You Improve Rankings and Conversions by Lynn Terry

If you experienced a drop in rankings, traffic or earnings this past year then you're likely searching everywhere for the latest greatest "SEO tricks" to regain your rankings.

There have always been tricks, loopholes, products, programs, etc that promise you quick success in the search engines. Some of them even work - temporarily.

Many of them can ultimately tank your site in the search results though, or at the very least leave you scrambling for the next best "trick" to try when that one no longer works.

Ironically, those "fast results" options eat up much more of your time & resources than simply writing and optimizing naturally. This has always been the case, but it's especially important now with the search engines becoming more intuitive...

Karon Thackston has been teaching these very methods (that work!) for years in her Step-by-Step Copywriting Course. She takes you through all the steps of writing copy that will rank high in the major search engines, and convert better - so that you get more leads and more sales from your content marketing. 

Her SEO Copywriting course is very practical - easy to understand and apply - and is broken into 10 video modules so you don't have to set aside an entire hour or more to learn each of the steps. Ideally you will learn and implement as you go, one step at a time, and this course is set up perfectly for that!

Given the effects of Google's Panda and Penguin updates that so many online business owners experienced over the last year, Karon has been busily educating her readers on some of the current issues - and how to implement necessary changes to keep your pages ranking AND converting at their best.

I've been following Karon's updates, and so I'll share a few highlights with you as a sort of checklist to make sure you're on the right track with the current issues:

Stop Over-Optimization!

Over-optimizing your web pages is a real concern with current search algorithms. Google spokesperson, Matt Cutts says, "People can overdo it to the point that we consider it keyword stuffing and it hurts. I would just make sure you do it in natural ways where regular people aren’t going to find it stiff/artificial. That tends to be what works best."

Smart Use of Synonyms

Google started incorporating synonyms into their algorithms several years ago. Synonyms are words with the same or similar meanings, and are used naturally in conversation so that you don't sound redundant when you're speaking. The same rule should be applied to your writing. 

The goal is to target a keyword phrase and use it 1-3 times in your copy, but to otherwise simply stay relevant to your topic in a very natural way.

Quality Rules

“Never sacrifice the quality of your copy for the sake of the search engines.”
-Karon Thackston

What may have worked in the past for "quick rankings" is no longer relevant. Quality pages, quality people and quality offers will rise to the top in the new search results - and even more so with future updates. Google is getting more and more intuitive about what "quality" really is, based not just on SEO strategies alone but on votes and responses by their searchers - and by your market's peers.

Better Targeting = Higher Conversion Rate

People are more savvy (and more skeptical!) than ever. You can't just guess who your target market is and use "standard copy" in your content. You have to understand exactly who you're writing to, what they need or want, and their preferred communication style (and/or lingo) in order to create content that compels visitors to read your copy and take a specific action.

Consider these four SEO copywriting tips carefully.

While they may seem obvious, old habits die hard and you may be hurting your rankings and conversions without even realizing it.

There are many people banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out why their content won't rank or convert. It's frustrating and confusing, especially if prior methods were working just fine before. Karon's practical in-depth copywriting course not only tells you why, but shows you how to fix the problems.

 

* This post was sponsored by Karon Thackston and written by Lynn Terry. There are no affiliate links in this post, but I will say that I have been a happy customer of her tutorials for many years - and highly recommend her Copywriting Course to anyone with an online business!

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Anyone Can Be Found on Social Media in 12 Hours by The Physics arXiv Blog

In 1967, the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram sent out 160 packages to randomly chosen individuals in the U.S., asking them to forward them to a single individual living in Boston. The task included a simple rule: The recipients could only send each parcel on to somebody they knew on a first-name basis.

To his surprise, Milgram found that the first package arrived at its destination via only two people. On average, he found that the parcels reached their destination via five pairs of hands, which amounts to 6 degrees of separation.
Milgram’s work has since been repeated on various social networks. For example, Microsoft says people on its Messenger network are separated by 6.6 degrees of freedom and Facebook claims its members are separated by only 4 degrees of separation.

But there is another element to this work that has been less closely studied, which is the time it takes to travel across a network. In Milgram’s experiment, the first package arrived in just four days. But the others took significantly longer.
So an interesting question is how quickly is it possible to traverse a social network — to track down a random individual across the network.
Today, we have an answer thanks to the work of Alex Rutherford at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi and a few pals who have measured how quickly it is possible to track down random individuals around the world using social networks.
They concluded that, on average, any individual is just 12 hours of separation from another.

Their data comes from a competition called the Tag Challenge, in which the goal was to find five individuals in five different cities in North America and Europe. The only clue was a mugshot of the individual, the name of the city he or she was in and the fact that they would be wearing a T-shirt with the logo of the event.

Rutherford and his team won the competition by identifying three of the five individuals in just 12 hours.

They say a key factor to achieving this feat was the ability of participants to target other individuals who may be to help. That’s in contrast to another strategy which is blindly gathering as many different people to help as possible.

“We have shown that this 12 hours of separation phenomenon relies crucially on the ability of social networks to mobilize in a targeted manner, using geographical information in recruiting participants,” they say.
Their data shows that one in three messages were targeted in an appropriate way during the most time sensitive part of the task. This indicates that social networks are able to tune their geographical communication to suit the task in hand.
 

And Rutherford and co say but it may be possible to get participants to react even more quickly using appropriate incentives.

That’s an interesting observation that may have important applications for the way politicians and grass roots organisations mobilise support. It may also help in emergency situations such as in tracking down individuals.

However, Rutherford and co-fail to address the important question of false positives, when individuals who are not legitimate targets are falsely identified.

That’s unlikely when the target is wearing a T-shirt with the competition logo on it. But the recent social media frenzy over the Boston marathon bombings, and the erroneous finger-pointing that occurred on social networking sites such as Reddit, shows that this is an important factor.

Perhaps future work can throw more light on how false positives can be handled and avoided.

But given the significant impact that these kinds of mistakes can have on individuals, important questions remain over whether social media will ever be a suitable medium for tracking individuals in this kind of situation.

Brought you by: The Physics arXiv Blog for MIT Technology Review Image via iStockphoto, adisa

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Why Blogging is The Lifeblood of a Business Website by Hamzah Qutub

Whatever social media geeks say about death of blogging with the rise of social media and microblogging sites such as Tumblr, Twitter etc, the fact is that Blogging remains one of the most reliable tools in the arsenal of a marketer. In earlier posts Benefits of Blogging and Why Blogging is an Important part of Inbound Marketing I’ve discussed the issue of business blogging. Other than SEO benefits a business website has a lot to gain if they have an active blog.

SEO Agencies: I regularly come across SEO and Online Marketing companies who are recommending blogging as a lead generation tool for their clients but their own blogs haven’t been updated for a blog time and then there are others in the business of Online Marketing who are blogging but without any strategy and just publishing self promoting posts and that too once or twice a month. This can be the thing which stops your prospects from becoming clients. After all if you are yourself not following the advice which you give to your clients and are being hypocrite than what reason they have to work with you?
Now first of all before starting a blog you must have an idea that how is this whole blog thing works. Blogging and particularly business blogging is not about promoting your products/services shamelessly, it’s about building relationships with your readers and solving their problems. Blogging itself can be a very effective tactic but if used in a wrong way it can destroy your brand.
Blogging is the process through which you can establish yourself as an authority in your field and drive more sales and traffic to your website.  By regularly publishing blog posts and guest blog posts you can share your knowledge of your subject with your readers. Blogging also has other benefits such as SEO, increased visibility.

Source: Hubspot
According to research conducted by Hubspot companies that blog 15 times or more get 5 times more traffic than companies that don’t blog.
According to the same survey of 7000 businesses conducted by Hubspot an average company will see 45% growth in traffic when increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50 articles.

The average company with 100 or more blog articles is more likely to experience continued lead growth. Companies with over 200 blog articles have 5 times the number of leads than those with 10 or fewer.
These are some of the benefits of blogging. Even after Panda and Penguin update by Google quantity is the deciding factor in Inbound Marketing. As a result more number of published blog posts directly translates into more website visitors, increased SERP rankings, higher number of leads and sales.

Time Constraint: Many companies complain that after all their work they don’t have enough time to maintain a blog or publish blog posts on a regular basis. You can solve this problem in two ways. First you can identify talent within your own organization and delegate them the responsibility to blog. You can work out a calendar where people from all departments of your organization will publish a blog post on a particular day of week.
Another option is to hire an outside consultant /agency to manage your blog on your behalf.  Many well known blogs are managed in this way. Ideally a company will provide you with a ghostwriter who will write blog articles for your blog but they will be published as articles written by you.

This post comes to you courtesy of www.Business2Community By Hamzah Qutub, Published April 22, 2013

Why You Should Blog!! Let us help!
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Meta Description Tags for SEO by Brent Carduff

The first thing that you need to know about the Meta Description Tag is that it no longer actually contributes to SEO or your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings.

So why the title?

Because the Meta description tag is still part of most SEO services, plug-ins, software packages, and discussions.

The Meta Description Tag is a statement describing the content of the webpage. It is not visible to website viewers (unless they know where to look), but is visible to search engines.

It makes up the content that usually appears on lines 2 & 3 (below the title) of your listing on the SERP. It is your first opportunity to “sell” to your potential visitor – definitely worth putting some time into.

To check the Meta Description Tags on your webpage (or on a competitors page):

From Firefox: On the Firefox navigation, go to Tools>Web Developer>Page Source (or hit Control U)

You should see the HTML code for that page. The Meta Description code will look something like this:

 

See: Do-it-Yourself SEO Test for help in finding your source code in other browsers.

The image shows part of the Meta Description tag for this page (the full tag is too long for display), the complete meta description reads “Want more traffic & better targeted visitors to your website? We can help. Echelon SEO is a Search Engine Marketing agency. Schedule your free consultation!”

If you were to find an Organic search result for this page, it would look like this:

You can see that on the Search Engine Result for this page, the Meta Description tag appears on the second and third lines of the results.

Meta Description Best Practices

1. Your Meta Description tag should be unique for every page, and should include your primary keyword or phrase for that page. That keyword will appear bold when it is used as part of the search term.

It’s okay to duplicate that keyword a second time within the description, however don’t get carried away with repetition or you may find yourself being penalized by the Search Engines.

2. Your Meta Description tag can be up to 250 characters long (including spaces), but only the first 150 or so characters will be visible on the Search Results Page, so plan accordingly.

3. Finally, although the Meta Description tag is not SEO related, always remember that you are writing for a potential customer. It is a sales tool and should always be crafted as such – include a call-to-action when appropriate.

If your Meta Description tag is left empty, which happens surprisingly often, you’re leaving it up to Google to “sell” to the searcher – it will choose content from your website to display on the 2nd and 3rd lines of your listing on the Search Engine Results Page.

This post comes to you courtesy of www.Business2Community.byBrent Carduff

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YouTube It: How To Promote Your Video Effectively Online by Nancy Perkins

Marketing strategies come in different forms like billboards, posters, posts on social networking sites and a lot more. Videos are also a popular form of effective marketing campaigns. One of the most popular video websites existing today is YouTube. It is a video-sharing website where millions of people visit to watch and upload videos every day. In fact, YouTube has recently announced that it reached 1 billion active users in a month. Now that is a lot of YouTubers right there.

Nowadays, companies use YouTube as an alternative means to market their services and products knowing the amount of traffic the website gets each day. But before you start creating videos and posting them on your channel, take time to go over some guidelines that can be useful in promoting your video:

When creating videos for your marketing campaign on YouTube, it helps if you think like a customer. Think what kind of video you would like to watch over and over again, and videos that can simply get your attention. This will help you come up with great ideas for your videos. The key is to make your videos exciting and informative so that people will watch your videos from start to finish.

It also helps if you make an effort to promote your video. Keep in mind that there are over 2 billion videos on YouTube which means you have to push your video to compete with others. It is not enough that you upload a video and just let the users visit your channel and view it. You have to market your video for it to get a huge number of views. You have the option to share your YouTube videos on social networking sites like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and others. If you have accounts on these social media platforms, your video can easily gather more views and those who have viewed it can also share the video as well.

Most probably, your competitors have their own YouTube channel as well and they have a lot of followers on their lists. What you can do is go to their channel and add those accounts under their followers list especially if they are clients. This will give the consumers more choices. If you have something good to offer that their current company does not have, you just might have a good chance to get yourself a new client.

When posting videos on the channel, make sure that you use the correct tags and categories. Most of the time, people add random tags on their videos even if they are not related to their video. Tags are important so that the viewers will be able to easily identify what your video is about. This works similar to keywords. The same goes for choosing a category. If your business is a clothing and makeup company, you can post videos under the “How to & Style” category, if it is a telephone or a computer company like Apple and Ring Central, there is the ”Gaming & Technology,” and the list continues.

YouTube is not only available in the United States. It is also available in the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries all over the world. Think of how much audience you can target in YouTube. These tips can help you market your business using this popular video sharing and hosting website. Make sure that you make the most out of your videos and YouTube channel.

This post comes to you courtesy of www.Business2Community.by Nancy Perkins

Need help with Optimizing YOUR videos? Contact us and visit: http://www.janetpennconsulting.com/video-optimization.html

How to Suck at SEO by Samantha Stanley

Follow these extremely simple steps to fail at SEO miserably:

■Focus purely on page ranks in Google and other search engines.

■Be sure to repeat your keyword at least 20 times in any given content page. Especially blogs.

■Include as many keywords as possible in your tag.

■Don’t worry about your target audience. Write content for search engines, not people.

■Who needs a target audience? Use the broadest keywords you can think of, like “pastries” instead of “gourmet chocolate chip scones.”

■Spice up that page about car insurance with keywords about beach vacations and island getaways to lure anybody to your site.

■Don’t even think about creating a mobile version of your site. Smartphones and tablets are just a phase anyway.

■Never update the content on your website. It just confuses people.

■Talk about any old random thing in your blog posts and don’t have a focused editorial plan or keyword strategy.

■Use keywords that aren’t linked to business goals.

■When writing a blog, make sure you have as many links as you can possibly fit into each paragraph. Your readers LOVE that underlined blue text.

■Pay online directories to spam links to your website and blog.

■Never check your analytics. If you can’t help yourself, ignore everything the report says.

Chances are that you have fallen victim to one of these “SEO tricks” before and that is okay. In such a quickly evolving industry, it’s easy to get caught up in quick fixes and “expert” advice. Recent updates to Google’s algorithm change the focus from inbound links and stuffed keywords to force companies to develop to long-term, content strategies that emphasize quality content that engages your target audience instead of pleasing search engine bots.

Have you committed one of these SEO crimes? How did you overcome it?

This comes to you courtesy of http://www.Business2Community.com (by Samantha Stanley)

Need help with Optimizing YOUR website? Contact us and visit: http://www.janetpennconsulting.com/seo.html

For 2013: 101 Tweet-Tastic Tools...

Dashboards

1. Hootsuite Hootsuite is undoubtedly one of my favourite and most used social media tools.  I literally couldn’t manage my own social media let alone all our clients without it.  A very easy to use dashboard for engagement, scheduling messages, responding to Twitter messages, direct messages etc.  It also has a host of reporting and measuring features although I prefer to use other tools for this.  It recently launched the ability to send messages at optimum times (similar to the Buffer feature which I love).  Also available on the go with your smart phone.

2. TweetDeck  Bought by Twitter back in 2011 you would think that this would be the top dashboard for Twitter.  Whether it will still be here for 2013 remains to be seen as the latest news cites that it risks closure over repeated failure to file financial records.

3. MarketMeSuite This great social media dashboard is similar to Hootsuite and TweetDeck. You can use it to manage and market on multiple social profiles, schedule messages across social networks, use Geo-targeting to locate customers nearby and many others.

4. SproutSocial SproutSocial has everything you need to enhance your social media effectiveness: monitoring, engagement, measurement and growth. You can use it to schedule updates, monitor your brand and your competition, find targeted customers, and measure your success with analytics.

5. Plugg.io This great management tool for Twitter and Facebook allows you to manage multiple accounts and separates Tweet streams, to make it easier to manage. It also helps you get more followers with their friend suggestions, and helps you “tweet awesome stuff” by plugging into your favorite blogs and news sources.

6. SpredFast A useful dashboard that you can use it to manage your social media as well as monitor and measure your voice (including uploading videos) across multiple social media platforms from one place.

7. MediaFunnel With MediaFunnel you can manage as many as 25 different social media channels. Features also include monitor brand and keyword mentions, talk with your audience from one place, assign and manage customer requests and drive traffic to your landing page and blog. It also allows for multiple users and roles.

8. Cotweet This is a great social media management tool that also has a free version. Use it for engagement, brand building, customer support, advanced workflow, analytics, third-party integrations and productivity tools. They also have a mobile app and show a very comprehensive profile of each of your followers that helps you understand them better.

9. Netvibes You can use Netvibes to keep track of news and trends, to create fun personalized widgets, monitor your account in real time, get your analytics and find out what people think of you.

10. Sysomos Sysomos is another great dashboard that has everything you might need for your social media engagement. They offer a real time monitoring dashboard, analytics and insights (including sentiment, demographics and influencers), engagement and management of all your social profiles, not just Twitter. No free trial though – but you can request a demo of this tool used by big brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Microsoft.

11. Argyle Social Argyle Social is a dashboard that you can use for all of your social media engagement needs: publishing content, engaging with followers, analytics and a new feature, Argyle Social Contacts, that helps you “connect the dots between social relationships and customer relationships.”

12. Splitweet this very basic free Twitter tool helps with the easy management of multiple Twitter accounts. As I said before, it’s very basic: you have all of your accounts in one place, where you can follow all of your contacts’ tweets easily and monitor your brand and reply to tweets.

13. BirdHerd This basic Twitter dashboard is specifically designed for Twitter management by teams and groups. Get your entire team to post, send messages and monitor Twitter accounts from one place, and control who posts what.

Automated Tools

14. SocialOomph is another great Twitter tool that I use on a regular basis.  As far as I’m aware it’s the only tool in the marketplace where you can send recurring scheduled updates. You can manage multiple Twitter accounts from it.  As well as scheduling tweets you find people, keyword alerts, send welcome messages to new followers and a lot of other great features.

15. Bufferapp is another one of my favourite Twitter tools.  You can schedule all of your articles, pictures and videos and Buffer will “automagically” share them for you. Their “optimum time” posting is a great feature and I mainly use Buffer for this purpose.  Also has the ability to manage multiple accounts and invite your whole team to use it. You can also get free and detailed analytics on all of your posts. Buffer also offer buttons and browser extensions and a mobile app for iPhone and Android.

16. Twuffer Twuffer is an easy and free-to-use Twitter tool that allows you to schedule tweets for the future. If you want to make sure that you never forget to announce your future releases, and that you appear to never sleep, than Twuffer is the perfect tool for that.

17. Dlvr.it If you are tired of having to schedule tweets and posts every time you finish a new article than try Dlvr.it. It’s a great way to remove the hassle of having to promote your blog posts all the time. And the greatest part is that it doesn’t work only with Twitter, but also with Facebook and LinkedIn.

18. Twitterfeed If you have a blog and want to link it to your Twitter feed with minimal effort, than Twitterfeed is another useful tool. It enables you to send a tweet just as soon as you publish your latest blog post.

Analytics

19. TweetReach is an interesting tool that shows you “how far your tweet traveled”. Simply type in your Twitter handle on this free service, and you can find out how many accounts you’ve reached with your last 50 tweets, what were your most retweeted tweets, who are your top contributors are and much more useful information.

20. TwitterCounter this is another free useful tool. It shows you all of your most basic Twitter stats in a fun, interactive way. You can also get different widgets and buttons to put on your blog or website that show your recent Twitter visitors and follower numbers.

21. TweetStats is a stats tool that graphs your Twitter stats for you. It can show you graphs of your tweets per hour and per month, your tweet timeline and reply statistics. However, because it is free, it takes quite long to load your stats, depending on how many other people are using the service at the same time.

22. Vizify A great, free and very fun analytics tool. Simply enter your name and you will see your basic Tweeter activity – retweets, tweets that got no response, geographic locations of followers, most retweeted tweets, best followers, favorite themes.  All of this information is presented in a attractive and very fun infographic.

23. Twitonomy this is an amazing and free tool that is still in its beta stage. I was really impressed with it because for a free tool, it has quite a few different methods of analysis: tweets and retweets, replies, mentions, hashtags, links, followers and people you are following, tweets per day of the week and per hours of the day…and the list goes on! They also provide some interesting ratios that will show you if you are on the right way or if you should change your Twitter tactics.

24. TweetGrader  A free tool that is powered by Hubspot. It’s a very simple and easy to use tool that will show you your twitter ranking/grade. It will tell you how influential you are on Twitter, based on a number of factors, such as the number and power of your followers and your level of engagement within the community.

25. TweetTronics TweetTronics looks at what people are saying to one another in real-time and then analyzes that data and converts it into “understandable results that you can act on”. It is an interesting tool, although it doesn’t offer too many features, like other analytical tools.

26 Twentyfeet Track all your Twitter and Facebook stats from one place. All you have to do is aggregate all your stats and they will notify you by email whenever your attention is needed.  I wrote a more in-depth review on Twentyfeet here.

27. Twitalyzer Twitalyzer is an amazing analytics tool that uses a plethora of different metrics. They also integrate data from Rapleaf, PeerIndex and Klout.

28. Backtweets if you want to know who is sending people back to your website, than there is an easy, quick and free way to do it: Backtweets. Simply enter the keywords in the search bar, and you will see all the tweets that link back to your site. And the best part is that URLs are found no matter the form they were tweeted in, whether they were full URL links or shortened URLs.

29. WhoTweetedMe this “contagious content analytics” from Hubspot will analyze URLs and shows you the most influential retweeters, potential reach and timelines. It works best on blog post URLs that are no older than 2 weeks.

30. Foller.me gives you rich insights into any public Twitter profile, with near real-time data about topics, mentions, hashtags, followers, location and more. It’s a great tool to find out not only how you are getting along on Twitter, but also your competition.

31. CrowdBooster If you want to get your Twitter analytics and suggestions and tools from the same place, than try CrowdBooster. Connect either with your Twitter account or with your Facebook account to get targeted recommendations, insights about each message, follower and fan growth over time and deep audience insights. You can also view your Twitter and Facebook accounts from the same, centralized place.

32. Visibli This social marketing and analytics tool helps you optimize your social media engagement. Visibli provides detailed, real-time analytics for all the links you shared on Twitter and helps you optimize your content for maximum engagement.  Their engagement bar is very useful and by using it I’ve seen an increase in my traffic.

33. Bottlenose This great tool provides you with live social intelligence by analyzing activity across all the major social networks. You can use it to search, monitor, analyze, target and engage in real-time – all from one place.

Get more engagement

34. InboxQ if you want to establish new relationships, get relevant followers and engage with more people, than try InboxQ. It is a great tool that will find questions on Twitter matching the keywords you choose. This way you can start a conversation with someone that is interested in the same thing you are. You can also add the InboxQ app to your Hootsuite account.

35. Tweriod this simple tool has a very specific feature. It analyzes your tweets and your follower’s tweets in order to find out when your followers are online. This way, you will know when the best time to tweet is, and you will reach a lot more people.

36. Tinker is a great tool that you can use to help with your Twitter (and Facebook) engagement. Simply enter a topic or a few keywords in the search bar and discover and join the top conversations on Twitter and Facebook. Great way to build new relationships and meet new people.

37. ITweetLive This innovative tool helps you converse with up to thousands of different Twitter users every day in just a few steps. It uses a Conversational Artificial Intelligence search engine that uses advanced Natural Language Processing and clustering tools to gather similar status updates, provide response suggestions based on real-time Twitter analytics, and measure engagement levels.

Finding Followers

38. NearbyTweets find out who is talking near you, literally! Type in a keyword, and find out who is tweeting in your town using that keyword. A great way to monitor real-time buzz and for building new relationships!

39. TweetArchivist find, analyze and archive tweets with Tweet Archivist. You can create archives of tweets and then analyze them through visualizations made by Tweet Archivist of: volume over time, top users, top Urls, top words, language, source of tweet, user mentions, hashtags and media. 

Cool Tools

40. Brandfluencers use this amazing tool to find out who brings traffic to your website via Twitter and reward them. Simply login with your Google Analytics account and see who sends tweets that bring you traffic to your website. You can then publish this ranking and offer a prize to the person who gives you the most traffic. Great way of motivating your followers to promote you on their Twitter accounts and getting more traffic!

41. GroupTweet if you have more than one contributor to your Twitter account, than GroupTweet is the tool for you. No matter how many people in your team, anyone can tweet from the same account. Contributors’ names can be hidden or shown at the beginning/end of each Tweet and they can login to the group’s private dashboard, or from their personal Twitter accounts.

42. ClicktoTweet this tool is used by top blogs, such as Hubspot. It basically makes your website’s content more shareable on Twitter. Write a preloaded tweet and then ClicktoTweet will generate a customized link that when clicked on by a visitor, it will be automatically added to their Twitter status box. It’s similar to a Retweet button, but it does more than simply advertise your blog title. Try putting in quotes and facts and figures, for example.

43. Twitrratr If you want to find out quickly what people really think of certain topics, products, companies etc., try this great, easy-to-use tool. Twitrratr distinguished between positive and negative tweets surrounding any word you wish. You’ll find out in percentages how many people are positive, negative or neutral about the particular product, brand, celebrity etc.

44. Woobox A great app that brings your Twitter feed to your Facebook page.  It is basically a Twitter tab for your Facebook page that shows your tweets, hashtags or search terms from your Twitter profile as a tab on your Facebook page.

45. TweetChat If you want to monitor and chat about one topic at a time, and stop the rest of the Twittersphere from getting in your way, then try TweetChat. Simply type in the hashtag that you want to follow and then talk to people in real-time. I love using this tool when I want to have a conversation, it works particularly well if there are lots of people joining the conversation.  They also have a feature called “smart pausing” which allows you to pause refreshing the page, so you can keep up and “user control” which allows you to block spammers and feature only the people you like.

46. TwitLonger Use Twitlonger when you simply need more than 140 characters to express yourself! Write what you want to and then a link to what you said will be automatically posted to your Twitter account.

47. Parrotfish Download this tool for your browser so you can see the full preview of each tweet. It’s great for those tweets that have links to photos and videos.

48. Twitcam If you want your followers to get more insight into you and your business, than Twitcam is perfect for you. You can use this tool to broadcast any video live – simply connect your webcam, login with Twitter and click the broadcast button. Twitcam will then post your video description and link to your Twitter account so that all your followers can see. You can also chat with viewers while broadcasting via twitter, right from the broadcast page. And once you are done, don’t worry about losing the video – it will be automatically archived by Twitcam.

49. TweetyMail Tweetymail lets you tweet via email, send and reply to Twitter DMs, follower users – all from your email! You can also use it to create custom email alerts for tweets, mentions etc. and receive powerful and detailed notifications for new followers and DMs.

50. Triberr If you are blogger and want “more eyeballs on your content” than Triberr could be of real help. I’m a massive fan of Triberr, which is a content distribution network for bloggers that gives them a platform to group into tribes. From there, Triberr makes it fun and easy for tribe-mates to share each others’ content via their Twitter.  Triberr is not only a fantastic way to generate more traffic but also a good way to network with other like-minded people.

51. Revisit Revisit is a real-time visualization of the latest tweets about a specific topic. You can use it to get a sense of the temporal dynamics in the Twitter stream.

52. TweetOldPost You can use this WordPress plugin to tweet about your old posts so you can get more hits for them and keep them alive in the twittersphere.

53. Twtvite Use this great tool to create events and groups on Twitter. You can use it to send invitations and sell tickets, create guest lists, nametags and even to take a post-event survey!

54. TweetBackup  this easy to use tool will backup all of your Twitter feed for free. Not only that, but it will also backup your entire list of Twitter friends. If anything happens to your account, you will have all of your data saved on TweetBackup’s online server. 

Relationship Management

55. Commun.it is one of the best free relationship management tools out there. Manage your Twitter relationships from one place and find out who your top influencers, supporters and potential customers are. It’s a great tool that will help you get the most out of each and every 140 characters you tweet and will help you build relevant connections and relationships!  I wrote a more in-depth review of Commun.it which you can read here.

56. SocialBro is a great tool that helps you understand your Twitter followers better. You can use it to take group actions when managing your contacts (which helps save a lot of time!), and to understand your followers: find out who your influencers are, get rich profiles of each of your followers, and you can also see when your followers are online, so you’ll get a better reach!

57. Contax.io  is a free contact management tool for Twitter and Facebook.  It will track your followers and friends and provide you with all the details you need to decide when to follow back. Use it to manage relevant, real-time relationship data for your personal and business accounts.

58. FollowerWonk use FollowerWonk to get a better understanding of your followers. Find out who they are, where they are and when they tweet, find out who the influencers are in your niche and compare your social graphs to others.

59. MentionMapp Explore your Twitter network in a very innovative and interactive way. Find out who interacts the most, what people are talking about, find interesting and relevant people to follow and much more.

60. TrueTwit TrueTwit is a validation service that helps you avoid spammers, by verifying if the people you follow and are following you are not robots. You can try the TrueTwit Basic package, which is free, or TrueTwit Premium that has a few more features (though not the most useful of features…)

61. Tweepi this great tool helps you get rid of all the people who aren’t following you back, automatically follow back new followers and clean up all of your inactive followers.  And they have recently added a great feature – force undesirable followers to unfollow you!

62. ManageFlitter one of my favorite tools that I use to tidy up my Twitter account.  It has a useful feature to find out which of your followers are active/not active.  Not only does it have the ability to unfollow large numbers of people, but you can also find out when the best time to post is (based on your account) and get your Twitter analytics.

63. Refollow one of the best free tools that helps you sort out your followers. Use it to see who hasn’t tweeted for up to 90 days, who never tweets, see who is talking about you so you can follow them back and engage and see users’ bio stats before you follow them. This great tool also allows you to sort all of your followers with different measures.

64. TweetPsych can create a psychological profile of any public Twitter user and compares it to others in its database. It uses linguistic analysis algorithms on the last 1000 tweets to identify traits that are used more or less frequently by the analyzed user. Quite an interesting tool that helps you understand your followers better.

65. Twendz is another interesting Twitter tool that helps you get a feel for the sentiment surrounding different Twitter conversations. It highlights conversation themes as well as the sentiment of different tweets related to the topic you are interested in. Use it to understand your followers better and to get a better understanding of their emotional reactions.

66. WhoUnfollowedMe Use this simple tool to see who isn’t following you back and who you aren’t following back. It’s very easy to use (and free) and there’s no need to create an account, because you can sign in directly with Twitter.

67. FriendorFollow Friend or Follow might not be the only one of its kind, but it’s still a tool worth mentioning. You can use it to find out for free who unfollowed you on Twitter, who is not following you back, who you aren’t following back and also who your friends are.

68. Twimbow This web app uses vibrant colors to help you engage with your Twitter followers. It filters users into different groups, it catches important tweets among the others, it colour codes mentions, retweets and DMs and it distinguishes between different types of messages.

69. Twitblock is a great tool that will help you find out if your followers are truly fans or just spammers. Scan for spammers and get them all in one list – this will make it easier for you to block them or report them, all from one place. 

Monitoring/Measuring

70. SocialMention  is similar to Google Alerts, only it is for social media only. Get real time social media search and analysis alerts about your brand, company or anything else that might be relevant to your business.

71. TweetLevel measures your buzz in real time on Twitter with this great tool. You can see how much people are talking about your brand, the Tweet Level of a topic or hashtag in order to boost your engagement, who the top influential tweeters are on any topic, what web links are shared the most and find out how influential you are on Twitter.

72. TweetBeep Anytime someone mentions you or your product or company, TweetBeep will send you an update. Well, not every time, but you will receive hourly updates by e-mail (if you want to receive them more regularly you need to upgrade to their paid account). It is a great tool that could really help with your customer care and your online reputation management.

73. RetweetRank Measure and track your retweets with this simple, free tool. Simply enter your username (or someone else’s) in the search bar to see your rank. Retweetrank will look up your recent retweets, number of followers, friends and lists, compare these numbers with other users’ and then assign you a rank. It’s a great way to find out how you stack up against the competition.

74. SocialPointer SocialPointer is a free real-time monitoring tool. It allows you not only to monitor your brand, but also to respond and engage in real time with other Twitter users. It is still in its beta version, so maybe there is more to come!

75. SocialSeek another great, free tool that is in its beta version. Choose any topic that you wish to know more about, and get all the latest tweets, news, videos and photos in one place. It’s a great tool for monitoring (but without analyzing) any topic you want.

76. Wildifire Social Media Monitor use Wildfire app and you can monitor your performance across all of your social media platforms. After you find out how you are doing in the social media realm, you can also check out your competition and see how your social media is stacking up against them, by follower bases.

77. Monitter enables you to monitor a set of keywords on Twitter in real time. You can also narrow the search to certain geographic locations. This way you can find out what’s going on in different parts of the world.

78. NutshellMail Use this tool to monitor and manage your Twitter and Facebook activity from one place. NutshellMail tracks your brand’s social media activity and emails you a summary on your schedule.

79. BrandChirp BrandChirp is a great brand management tool for Twitter. You can use it to effectively monitor, manage and resolve all brand activity. It also has a “target follow” feature that can help you reach a bigger audience and establish new connections.

80. SharedCount use SharedCount to track URL shares, likes, tweets, and more. Enter a website address in the search bar and you will find out how many people have shared it on different social media platforms.

81. Twilert Twilert is a web app that will send you email updates regularly of tweets that contain any keyword you want. It’s a great tool for brand monitoring – without the hassle of having to do regular searches on Twitter.

82. SocialMotus have recently launched this great social media marketing and monitoring tool for Twitter and Facebook. It allows you to manage, schedule and publish posts, monitor and engage and also to analyze and measure your performance.

83. TweetBig This free Twitter management tool has many useful features: an rss management tool that allows you to tweet from your favorite sources, analysis of the followers of your competitors in order to identify relevant users to follow, automatic follow back, tweet scheduling, follower gathering based on keywords and topics you are interested in, and red carpet finder (finding your most influential followers).

News/Content Curation

84. Scoop.it Connect with your Twitter or Facebook account, enter all the topics you want to follow and start scooping news.  And if you find an interesting scoop, you can tweet it right from their website.

85. Paper.li Publish your own online newspaper for free! You can use it to publish any web content, such as Twitter, Facebook or your blog, into an online newspaper. And Paper.li will monitor all of your content sources for you to update your paper automatically. You can also customize your paper, add your logo and branding.

86. Curate.me Use Curate.me to get the best news from your friends and the people you follow straight to your inbox. You can get personalized news based on your interests. This way you won’t miss any of the top tweets and shares.

87. Trap.it  is a tool that gets smarter as you use it more. It will discover high quality content and new sources for you, helping you to never miss any article that you might be interested in. It is quite similar to Scoop.it and Addictomatic.

88. Twylah You can use Twylah to share your tweets with “awesome looking” websites and widgets. Twylah basically takes your tweets and creates a website out of them. It’s a great tool that will help you get noticed beyond Twitter, get you more traffic from your tweets and bring your message into focus by automatically organizing by your trending topics. 

Measuring Social Influence

As social media has grown there have been more and more tools that measure your influence online.  Below are 3 of the most common used ones.  It’s worth mentioning  that I’m not a huge advocate of them and take their scoring with a “pinch of salt”.  They are a useful guide but they’re algorithms change and often it’s more about quantity than quality hence my feelings.

89. Klout Use this tool to find out what your “Klout score” is. Connect your social networks to Klout (Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn) and then it crunches this data and gives you an overall score. There has been much controversy about Klout’s scoring and how their algorithms work, I wrote a post here about it.  They did however recently change their algorithms, another useful post which lots of experts chimed in on (including myself!) is here.

90. Kred is quite similar to Klout. You can sign in with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and find out how influential you are on each of these platforms. They have a few more extra features, such as Kred Story, which is a visual history of your social media influence; you can also see other people’s most influential content, the most popular tweets and words for any active hashtag and a lot of other interesting information.

91. PeerIndex is my personal favorite if you are going to use these tools.  It’s a free tool that helps you understand your impact in social media by measuring interactions across the web. With it you will learn not only who influences you, but also who you influence.  You can also receive PeerPerks depending on how influential you are. 

Search

92. SocialBuzz can be used to search social networks in real time. Apart from Twitter, it also supports Facebook and Google+. It has several main features: search using multiple keywords, exact keywords and minus keywords tool, quick location filtering, search results analytics and three-column layout of the search results.

93. TipTop A  Twitter-based search engine that will help you discover real people that you can engage with, discover people’s emotions about particular topics and everything else that people may be talking about that is related to your search.

94. Twazzup Use Twazzup to filter Twitter – get only the news you want out of the live Twitter content. You can then find out who are the most influential people on a given topic.

95. PostPost With PostPost, you can see on your homepage all the topics, photos, videos and links from the people you are the most connected to on Twitter. They also have a search engine that you can use to find any Tweet, link, photo or video that you and the people you follow have shared with each other in the past.

96. SnapBird With SnapBird, you can search beyond Twitter’s history. Use it to look for tweets from your own timeline, tweets mentioning you, through someone’s favorites or search for a conversations between you and other Twitter users.

97. Tweepz It’s not always easy to find interesting, relevant people to follow on Twitter. That’s where Tweepz comes in – it lets you search for twitter users by city, keyword or names in their bios.

98. Twtrland Use this great tool to search for any name, location or tag from Twitter and let Twtrland visualize the social footprint of your keyword. You can use it to discover new people, get a glimpse of their social impact and find ways to connect and increase your network. 

Hashtags

99. Hashtagify.me This is a free tool that could really help you compose better tweets with better hashtags. Simply type in any hashtag you can think of and Hashtagify will show you relevant hashtags around the topic. These hashtags are displayed in different sized bubbles, so you can find out in an interactive way which hashtags are more popular than others.

100. Tagdef Hashtags can be quite confusing sometimes and often times you might not even understand what a hashtag could possibly mean! That’s where Tagdef comes in: enter a hashtag in the search bar and this free tool will tell you what it really means.

101. WhatHashtag If you want more people that could be interested in you or your company to find you on Twitter, than hashtags are one of the best ways to go. However, it’s not always easy to get a hashtag right. That’s where WhatHashtag comes in. Simply enter your search keyword in the search bar and WhatHashtag will give you the most popular hashtags used worldwide to discuss that particular topic.

originally posted on January 16, 2013 by http://www.Socialable.co.uk Lilach