Social Media Marketing - Tools to Refine Your Visibility, Engagement and Measure

#1: Socialbakers

Get useful stats from Socialbakers. Socialbakers offers paid services to monitor your Facebook statistics, but it also provides useful free statistics for Facebook and LinkedIn.

#2: Kurrently
Find out what’s being shared on social media with Kurrently, a free, easy-to-use, real-time search engine for results from Twitter and Facebook. “Companies can capitalize on just-in-time marketing and social CRM opportunities like never before.”

#3: Blekko
Select the sites you want to search with Blekko. You can create “slashtags” for groups of URLs, friends, experts and communities and you can “slash in” what you want and “slash out” what you don’t want to search.

Tools to Measure Specific Social Media Goals

#4: Social Mention
If social awareness is your main social media goal, then be sure to check out Social Mention, which allows you to set up social media alerts so you can measure awareness for specific keywords.

#5: Klout
Klout is another tool you can use to measure awareness on Twitter and Facebook.

#6: PostRank Analytics
If customer loyalty is your main social media goal, you can use PostRank Analytics to measure results in improving loyalty.

Tools to Get the Job Done

#7: Blogsearch.Google
Use Blogsearch.Google.com for better search results than Google Alerts. There are many tools to monitor keywords. Don’t forget to use this one!

#8: Twitterfall
Use Twitterfall when you need to show executives how you can monitor what’s being said about your brand on Twitter.

#9: Friend or Follow
Friend or Follow helps you improve your Twitter marketing. It tells you who’s not following you back on Twitter and who you’re not following back.

#10: Wetoku
Sign up for Wetoku to make the popular side-by-side video interviews. All you need to do is sign in and send an invite code by email to the person you want to interview.

#11: Socialcam
If you have an iPhone or an Android phone, be sure to check out Socialcam. Steve says this is the easiest way to share videos with your social networks.

#12: Stupeflix
Use Stupeflix to integrate after-effects and photos to your videos. If you want to do editing without using editing software, this tool is for you.

Google Adwords - Broad Match Modifier

Today Google Adwords introduced the broad match modifier, a new AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords that have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today.

To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer's search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren't considered close variants.

The graphic below illustrates the relative reach of different keyword match type strategies. As you can see, modified broad match keywords match more searches than the equivalent phrase match keyword, but fewer searches than the equivalent broad match keyword. Match behavior also depends on the specific words you modify. For example, the keyword formal +shoes will match the search “evening shoes,” but the keyword +formal +shoes will not.



During initial tests, advertisers who mainly used phrase and exact match found that adding modified broad match keywords increased campaign clicks and conversions, while providing more precise control than with broad match.

Modified broad match keywords have a traffic potential closer to phrase match than broad match. If you mainly use broad match keywords in your account, switching these keywords to modified broad match will likely lead to a significant decline in your overall click and conversion volumes. In order to maintain these volumes, we recommend keeping existing broad match keywords active, adding new modified broad match keywords, and adjusting bids to achieve your target ROI based on observed performance.

If you're in Canada or the UK, you can log into your AdWords account to start adding modified broad match keywords today. You can also use the AdWords Editor or the AdWords API.

This feature is currently available to advertisers in Canada and the UK as an open beta.

Google AdWords Launches Two New Ad Types

Google has launched two new ad types in their AdWords service. The first is called AdWords Comparison Ads and the second is a feature called Ad Sitelinks.

AdWords Comparison Ads

As the name suggests, this new service will make it possible for users to compare offers provided by various advertisers.

Google Comparison Ad unit

The basic Comparison Ad allows users to specify what they are looking for, in a bit more detail than is normally possible on a regular search query, and then delivers a comparison of different offers side-by-side.

Users that engage with a comparison ad will now have to click on a promotion listed within the comparison table that they think is of interest to them. If they are not satisfied, they can provide some more details about what they want, to see better targeted ads.

When the user identifies a satisfactory offer, the advertiser can be contacted directly on the phone – making it a pay per call ad – or a quote can be requested.

Google will anonymise the user’s number with a unique code, through which the advertiser can then contact the user. Advertisers will not receive any user information unless the user wishes to release it. Advertisers will pay Google only if a user calls on the phone number allocated for that advertiser or if the user fills out a form requesting a quote.

The comparison ads feature is very speedy, as it provides relevant offers in less than one second, and the ads will only be for real products. There will be no teaser rates or bait and switch offers.

At present, the service is only available to a few users in some states in the U.S.A and it is only for advertisers in the mortgage and refinance field.

Ad Sitelinks

Just like certain organic results include sitelinks, certain ads can now also feature sitelinks via a new feature called Ad Sitelinks.

Advertisers with extremely high quality ads will be able to specify up to 10 links to deeper pages on their site. These can be links to special offers, featured products, support pages or other popular pages on the site.

Up to 4 Ad Sitelinks will show up below the regular ads for keywords that meet certain quality requirements:

1.The ad should have the first position above the organic search results
2.The ad should have a very high quality score, typically 10/10
3.The Ad Sitelinks URLs must direct users to pages that are part of the main website, and allow users to navigate freely

The links can be updated without changing the ads, as frequently as desired. The option to add sitelinks shows up in the campaign settings tab, under the “Networks, devices and extensions” section, and is labeled with the text “Show additional links to my site within my ad”.