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I bet you already are using some of these lifesaving tools. Buffer, HootSuite, Social Sprout, Sendible, Bitly, and SocialOomph are just some of the powerful tools that can help manage your social media networks.
The problem is a lot of those awesome tools charge money. And that can be an issue when you are on a tight budget.
Another problem is not all of these tools can help you create content, see when your audience is most active, track how many visitors converted into leads, or tell which keywords are currently trending.
Thankfully, there are a plethora of free tools designed to give your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn account a little something extra. Here are 12 100% free social media tools that help manage, monitor, or develop content – in no particular order....
This is a wasted opportunity. Many marketers have reported rapid and significant ROI from adopting these tools; but first, they had to convince higher-ups to make the up-front investment. So, in the interest of helping clear that path, I am suggesting a Marketing Technology Starter Kit: the seven programs that every company’s marketing team should have access to, at a minimum, to grow leads, opportunities, and revenue.
These programs are essentially an online form of direct marketing. Traditionally the two most important factors in the success of direct marketing campaigns have been the list — getting the materials in front of the right audience — and the offer – offering them something that they will value and act on.
And direct marketers have been measuring and optimizing to improve results for decades, in a way that even David Ogilvy admired. In my Starter Kit you’ll see repeatedly how marketing technologies help you get in front of the right audience at the right time with the right offer.Here’s my list of seven technologies that are table stakes for today’s marketer....
If you've ever tried searching for free stock photos on the Internet, you probably know what a ridiculous hassle it can be.
As a general rule, free stock photos are extremely difficult to find. A huge portion of the stock photo market is owned by professional companies like Shutterstock and 123RF, who charge $20 or more for a single photo. Even when you can find free stock photos, most are low resolution, watermarked, blurry and, at best, uninspired.
Lucky for you, there are a few ways to access high-quality stock photos without any hassle or significant cost.
Here's a lovingly curated list of the world's best free stock photo websites for designers, business owners and anyone else...
Mobile devices like iPads and Androids have transformed the way we experience boredom. No longer is a wayward commuter forced to play Snake or Tetris, occupying themselves in a hardly satisfying, and utterly pixelated virtual reality. The tablet or smart phone-wielding travelers can now immerse themselves in an entire library of art and culture-related distractions, finding solace in everything from a Vincent van Gogh game to a digital version of the Louvre.
Just this week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a 140-year-old cultural stalwart of New York City, went the way of the future and introduced an iPhone app. Described as "exceedingly simple and modest" by Forbes, the move to make art more accessible is something we can't help but love. So, in the spirit of the Met's 21st century attitude, we've put together a list of mobile museums and art-honoring programs that will spark creativity in your everyday life.
Behold, 18 apps every creative and artist type should download now:
Via John Evans
To celebrate the 2 year anniversary ofThe Future of Ink, we asked our expert writers to tell us about their favorite digital publishing tools they’ve discovered in the last six months or so.
If you are looking for tools to help you publish, curate and create digital content, you’ll find12 terrific tools to check out in this article....
When I go to Disneyland, I race to the famous rides first: Splash Mountain, Matterhorn Bobsleds, and Indiana Jones. They're the biggest and best. But there are many attractions I miss in my sprint for the headliners.
Social networks are like the rides at Disneyland. There are so many social media sites and features that some are bound to slip through the cracks.
Which Facebook, Twitter and the other major social network features have slipped under our noses? Here are 41 tricks and tools for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram.
Do you want to present visual messages in new ways? This article shows eight design resources and tools to create visual content quickly and easily.
Online Voice Recorder is a free simple application which records sound from microphone.
After recording you can trim the sound and save it to your computer.
Via Nik Peachey
Even though I create nearly all of my documents online and use cloud storage services that support a multitude of file formats, there are still a few occasions when someone sends me a file that I need to convert. If your school is not using Google Drive, Dropbox, or a similar cloud service, you may find yourself and your students in need of a file conversion tool too. A more common need for a file conversion tool arises when we start to work with audio and video files. Here are five good online file conversion tools....
If you haven’t used IFTTT before, it’s like a dashboard of connectors that can make anything hooked up to the web work by itself, using triggers, or ‘ifs’, to power devices, social media and web services. The triggers include Internet of Things devices, time of day, weather, football results or social media pings. The actions include electricity switches, push-alerts, email, and pretty much any web service.
Anyone can create their own ‘recipes’, as IFTTT calls them, and if you are stumped for inspiration, you can browse open, shared recipes that have been created by other IFTTT users. There are over 136,000 of them here.
If you are looking to turbo charge your social media strategy, here are 8 of our favourite IFTTT recipes (with two fun ones for good luck):...
Screen Recorder is convenient and safe software that allows to take PC screen video capture of high quality, with or without sound. The program has no viruses, spyware and unwanted applications. Screen Recorder has been tested by the advanced antivirus systems that proved it is absolutely secure software in its segment.
Via Nik Peachey
In this collection, we are presenting more than 12 useful online signature maker websites for you. These websites will help you in electronic transactions that are increasing day by day because of the increased trend of business transactions on the internet. Electronic signatures have made it easy to approve online contracts without the fear of having original content being imitated as documents.
The listed websites in this collection let you create your own electronic signature easily without requiring any installation. So here is the complete list after the jump. We hope you will find this collection useful. Do let us know what you think about this compilation....
Are you looking for some new social media tools to add to your arsenal?
Every day, we come across new tools and, each quarter, we write a post where we share some really interesting tools that we have come across. Some of these tools are new, some are in beta and some have been around for a while but we have only recently discovered them.
I’m sure you’ll find something in this list that will help your business!...
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Mobile apps and tools can make it so a marketer’s entire day is filled with opportunities to connect, engage, and share. You can get more done while commuting, lounging, waiting, and any time when you’re not tethered to a desktop or laptop.
Which apps are best for social media marketers?
I gave a huge number of them a test run and came up with 44 amazingly useful apps that can help you accomplish social media marketing tasks with a tap, swipe, or touch....
A lot of soccer moms live in the most-searched zip codes in the United States....
Pretty basic stuff, yes. The most interesting thing Esri calculates, however, are their own "Tapestry" classifications, a series of "68 unique segments based on demographic and socioeconomic characteristics." The profiles are broken into two sections: "Lifemode groups," which are "markets that share a common experience—born in the same generation or immigration from another country—or a significant demographic trait, like affluence," and "Urbanization groups," which are "markets [that] share similar locales, from the urban canyons of the largest cities to the rural lanes of villages or farms."
The classifications are based on data from the 2010 Census, the American Community Survey (ACS), The Doublebase consumer survey from GfK MRI and the Esri's most Updated Demographics.
The segments each have very specific titles. For example, you'll find groups titled "Boomburbs" (young professionals with families who live in the suburbs and own minivans) and "Trendsetters" (people who "live life to its full potential").
We were curious how Esri might describe the people living in some of the most popular zip codes in the country, so we went back to our list of 2013's most-searched zip codes to find out....
Want to track your packages with the swipe of your finger? Now you can. Need to split a complicated dinner bill? It's no longer the end-of-meal buzz kill.
It's been an exciting year for mobile apps. Not only have some of our favorite apps gone through redesigns and other changes, but a ton of new apps have been created to make our lives easier.
Here are some of my favorite apps that have made a difference in my life this past year whether through better organization, helpful tips, or teaching me something new....
Here is a wonderful chart featuring a plethora of diverse tools arranged according to the task they are to perform. From web tools to create digital quizzes to note taking and brainstorming tools, this chart is definitely a must have. The only inconvenience I see in it is that the web tools mentioned are not hyperlinked so you need to Google them yourself to access them. I am not really sure who has created this chart. I did an extensive search online but still could not figure it out. However, I came across this work in David Andrade's blog Educational Technology Guy ...
Picture yourself being "that standing desk guy" not just at the office, but at a coffee shop, library, and wherever else you happen to be.
There are a lot of standing desks on the market these days. But most of them are pretty stationary. They assume you have the sort of job where staying in place is what you have to do from 9 to 5.
Many of us need to be mobile during the day. We visit customers or colleagues, hang out in coffee shops, or work while traveling. That's when you might want something that's not only standing, but also portable. Something like StandStand, perhaps?
Now on Kickstarter, StandStand is a three-piece wooden kit that locks together into one sturdy platform for your laptop. And very elegant it is too. It weighs less than two pounds, flattens into one interconnected lump, and costs as little as $50 if buying early through the crowdfunding campaign, which is considerably less than most standing desks (probably only building your own is cheaper).The design comes from Luke Leafgren, who makes his case in the video here:...
For the last couple of years Pixabay has been my go-to resource for public domain images. Pixabay was recently updated to make it easier than ever to find quality public domain images. Now when you visit the search page on Pixabay you can filter your search according to image type (photo, drawing, vector), image orientation (landscape or portrait), and image category (subject matter).
When you find an image on Pixabay you can download it in the size that suits your needs. Most images are offered in at least three sizes. Registered users (registration is free) do not have to enter a captcha code to download images. Users who do not register can download images, but they do have to enter a captcha code before downloading each picture....
If you are looking: to reduce email for social insights to be more productive for new social selling tools for ways to connect and stay connected to manage your sales process and funnel better then one or more of the following may be just what you need.
... A few months ago I wrote a post about 10 tools that I found helpful for managing social media. It was very well received, so I thought it was time for another post highlighting some new tools that I find helpful in other ways. However, the tools I mention here are not meant to replace the ones in my previous post, as I am still using most of those...
...Having a style guide for reference is especially important if you are passing off a CMS to a client who will be using it to create content on a regular basis. Without a guide your client may go nuts with customization features that may be built into the theme. Before you know it, he will have used 10 different typefaces in various places and multiple header colors and sizes. The beautiful website you created can end up looking like digital goulash in the end, which is no good for your portfolio.
I’d like to introduce you to Stylify Me, a handy new tool that can automatically create a quick style guide for any website. Simply enter the site URL and the app will return its background colors, text colors, typography, and image dimensions....
Content manager and content marketers lives can get a bit hectic. They spend a lot of time identifying what is seen as relevant and valuable content, in relation to their product, with the intent of changing or enhancing consumer behavior.
That is content marketing and the belief of this marketing strategy is that if you help increase the intelligence of your consumer base by putting more information in front of them, valuable information, then they’ll reward you with their business and loyalty.
This often requires long hours of internet research to find what is considered relevant and valuable information that will elevate your target audience, putting together posts that have both great content and great visuals, and doing it on a consistent basis. These are 15 free content marketing tools that will help you deliver that amazing content to keep your customers coming back for more...
Kdan Creative Cloud allows users to access their content on different devices and in the near future founder CEO Kenny Su says the startup, which is currently raising closing its Series A, plans to parse data from all of its apps to help people organize their content more quickly based on file formats.
“Currently our marketing position is to try to complete the whole mobile content creation experience between Adobe and Evernote. Evernote’s business strategy is to help people keep everything in the cloud, but if people create something more, they don’t have the tools. Adobe has always been targeted to professional users, not mobile users who are amateurs,” say Su.
Two of Kdan’s apps, NoteLedge and Animation Desk, have gained traction through a partnerships with Samsung and Microsoft. The apps are currently pre-installed on several of Samsung’s mobile devices, including the Galaxy 3 and Galaxy tablet, in 13 Asian countries, as well as Microsoft’s Lumia series in Taiwan...
As social media has become an essential part of journalism, tools for searching, monitoring and curating content from around the web are increasingly part of a journalist’s day-to-day toolbox – both for newsgathering and engaging users.
At the next news:rewired conference on 23 July Sarah Marshall, social media editor EMEA at The Wall Street Journal, and Richard Moynihan, social media editor at The Telegraph, will lead a session on tools, tips and techniques for journalists using social media.
In the meantime, here are 12 social media tools that journalists can try...
Create interactive images with multiple soundbites using this free iOS app
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Albert Costill offers an excellent list of tools for your social media tool kit - all of them free.