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

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

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

10+ Canva keyboard shortcuts to help you create images faster!

Would you like a low-cost and quick tool to create graphics for your social media channels or website?

Did you know Canva offers free templates and images for just $1.

Are you aware that there are Canva keyboard shortcuts?

With the shift towards visual marketing for businesses, you can now create graphics for your social networks such as FacebookTwitter or Pinterest using Canva and save a lot of time (and money).

In this article you’ll find 10+ Canva keyboard shortcuts to help you create graphics faster.

Canva vs. Adobe Photoshop

Do you remember when you needed Adobe Photoshop if you wanted to create graphics for your business? Not only was it expensive, but it had a very steep learning curve. With new tools like Canva, you can create graphics for:

  • Social networks
  • Facebook news feed images
  • Facebook Ads
  • Twitter Ads
  • Blog
  • Custom dimensions
  • And more

The difference is that with Canva, it doesn’t take much time or cost very much – most images are free.

Canva also doesn’t have a steep learning curve and has become a tool I use regularly for projects.

They also include a lot of pre-built templates you can work from or create your own in just a few minutes.

Besides making it easy to create graphics, Canva also includes a number of hidden keyboard shortcuts.

These shortcuts combined with a drag-and-drop interface make Canva a tool you want in your toolbox.

Canva keyboard shortcuts

Continue reading 10+ Canva keyboard shortcuts to help you create images faster!

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.

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!

Hyper Alerts alternatives
Hyper Alerts announced that they would be shutting down.

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

Continue reading 3 Hyper Alerts alternatives to keep tabs on your Facebook Pages

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:

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:

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

Continue reading 10 Animated GIF tools to help excite your audience

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

Continue reading 25 Social media tools to help grow your brand

5 Things to Give Your Social Media Manager

This post could easily be called, “5 Things to Ask for as a Social Media Manager,” but either way, I can say from firsthand experience that the communication between business owners/managers/marketing directors and their social media managers is dismal. Delegating your social media—whether to an employee or independent contractor—doesn’t mean you wash your hands of all things social. Instead, you need to take an active role in making sure that the voice of the company is what you want it to be, and that you’re actively helping to shape it. Here are 5 of the 51 tips I share in my new book, 51 Ways to Help Your Social Media Manager Crush It! 

51 Ways to crush it as a social media manager

1. Share your personality with us
Continue reading 5 Things to Give Your Social Media Manager