Toolkit Tuesday - 5/15/12
It seems every time you turn around these days there’s a new Social Media tool that promises to make your content more compelling, your online community more inspiring, and your on-and-off-line life easier. Keeping up with Joneses when it comes to Social Media proves not only to be time-intensive but downright exhausting. What tools are actually worth your time and will help improve your ROI and what tools should be relegated to the sidelines?
In our weekly blog “Social Media Toolkit Tuesday” we do the legwork for you. We’re here to help you sift through the crowded Social Media landscape and the tools that we use to make our lives a little easier.
Here are this week’s Social Media Tools:
1) DiggDigg
DiggDigg is a plugin for Wordpress blogs and websites that allows you to put a social sharing bar alongside your latest post. It enables your readers to easily share your content to over 20 leading social media networks. You can choose Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and more. The share bar with buttons appears at the top or on the side of your page content depending upon your design needs. It also can be static or floating (meaning it stays in the frame as people scroll down through the content.)
The Takeaway: For a free tool, DiggDigg is incredibly useful, making it easy for readers to share your content easily and helping you to keep your pages looking good.
2) PicMonkey
We originally stumbled onto PicMonkey when we were researching handy tools for our blog about Pinterest.
PicMonkey allows you to crop, edit, rotate, and re-size your photos as well as add color, remove color, sharpen, or change the exposure. Like Instagram, you can also change the filter of your photo to “Black & White,” “Daguerreotype,” “Warhol” and everything in between.
But that’s not all! You can add text, borders, and even make teeth whiter in your photos with the PicMonkey interface. PicMonkey is a free tool and does not require registration to join.
The Takeaway: PicMonkey need not be limited only to Pinterest – you can use it anywhere you share photos as content: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even your blog or website.
This is a sample photograph PicMonkey provides to try their tool:
We are able to change it in less than 2 minutes to this:
3) TweetChat
TweetChat is a free Twitter tool which allows you to communicate with users around specific hashtags in one easy stream. It’s very simple to use, you just sign in with your Twitter login, and enter the hashtag you want to follow.
You will then see all the tweets that are being sent using that hashtag. This is particularly useful when you are watching an event live-stream, when you want to keep track of a news story, or when you are in a tweet chat.
The Takeaway: TweetChat helps you get the most out of Twitter and be a part of conversations where you want to have a voice. It’s also a great way to build your community with like-minded people.
Here is TweetChat in Action with the #smallbiz Hashtag:
If you have questions about DiggDigg, PicMonkey, and/or TweetChat: Just Ask Betsy! Email us, subscribe, or leave a comment below: