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by Michael Stuart

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Influencer Marketing Tools used by industry experts

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A list of the favorite Influencer Marketing tools used by Industry Leading Experts

Over 40 experts reveal the best Influencer Marketing tools to build and manage a campaign, an expert roundup of the top most Influencer’s in the Industry.
Buzzsumo is among the most popular tools and is used to identify influencers in a niche or category.

Ways to use BuzzSumo:
  • Sort results by their reply ratio and average retweets, plus highest domain authority if they have a website
  • View the recent links they shared so you get a sense of what interests them
  • Use the advanced search function similar to how you would in Google
  • Click the ‘View Links Shared’ button to see the influencer’s most popular shared content

Buzzsumo can do many things, like surface highly-shared content, but in regards to influencers, it can help you search any topic area (Google keyword phrase) for influencers to discover the most influential people by niche. You can choose to narrow your search results by bloggers, journalists, companies or regular people.
  • Then you can save and organize these influencers into any number of outreach lists. They have another feature to help you build an audience of Twitter users who’ve shared content from your domain, which you can then use for targeting in a Twitter ad campaign, if you want to stay visible to people who’ve already been influential for you- these people have retweeted once, so they’re much more likely to again than any other random person, which makes that ad money well-spent.
  • This latter helps you reach both medium and lower-degree influencers. The influencers with the most power are the hardest for companies to enlist and influence themselves, so it’s very important to also have a plan for accessing and working with medium and lower-power influencers.
  • It also sheds light on quite a few things including domain authority and several metrics regarding influence on Twitter.

Buzzsumo is easy to use, straightforward, and saves time, for example visit https://app.buzzsumo.com/research/most-shared to find the most shared content for a keyword phrase.


Best Social Media Automation Tools to Boost Traffic

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What are the Best Social Media Automation Tools to Better Reach My Audience?

The internet is chalk full of tools that are useful in this arena. Many sites exist to make your life easier by taking some of the burdensome work off of your shoulders. We’ve compiled a list of the nine best social media automation tools (in no particular order) to help you make a decision as to which tool is ideal for your needs. We asked the following two questions:
  • What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
  • What should I be concerned about?
Here are the nine best social media automation tools:
1 – dlvr.it
dlvr.it offers many options to automate posting to social media. From automating your blog within minutes of publishing – to scheduling posting – to repeating posts automatically, dlvr.it has a full arsenal of tools to make your life easier.
dlvr.it blog screenshot 2What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
dlvr.it offers the ability to post multiple posts per day from an RSS Feed to Socials. On the basic plan, users have the option to post to three different socials from different platforms. Free users can also use content filters to exclude any posts that do not meet criteria automatically. dlvr.it also offers Instagram integration as an input, as well as Twitter and Pinterest. This platform integrates into many different social media platforms. dlvr.it also offers the ability to either schedule posts, or post automatically.
The Pro plan is reasonably priced for most users. At $9.99 per month, users can expect to be able to use up to 10 social media accounts and up to 50 sources of input. The price tag of the Pro plan also provides access to the Echo feature. This power packed feature allows automated reposting of content from your input source up to two additional times without you having to do any further scheduling. dlvr.it also offers a free trial, which does not require additional credit card information.
What should I be concerned about?
Analytics for dlvr.it offer just click stats and follower stats. However, you can add Google analytics tags with additional parameters attached to your social media accounts. dlvr.it also does not provide in-depth demographics of followers.
2 – Hootsuite
Hootsuite has built a platform that is attractive to marketers because of its built-in analytics.
best social media automation tools hootsuite
What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
Hootsuite’s software packs a punch using Analytics. Hootsuite provides in-depth, detailed analytics that can help you to determine your audience engagement, metric performance, and real-time feedback. Hootsuite offers basic analytics for their free users, as well as enhanced analytics for its Pro users. For its free users, RSS integrations are free and unlimited. Upgrade to their Pro plan, and you can schedule bulk messages. Hootsuite also offers its users support through free social media classes.
What should I be concerned about?
Hootsuite does offer all of these features but prevents its free users from using more than three profiles. Hootsuite also does not allow image posting for its free users. Their analytics provide a lot of power, but for the novice user, this can be very confusing and difficult to understand. The front dashboard can be a bit confusing if you are not used to looking at so much information.
3 – Buffer
Buffer is a tool that works with input sources and social media accounts to publish your content quickly and easily.

What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
Buffer has a wealth of tools that help their users stay connected to social media wherever they are. They employ the use of a mobile app to make it quick and easy to schedule a post from anywhere. Buffer has also created a system that will work to find the best times to post your content. Possibly the most attractive feature that Buffer offers is the option to create infographics inside the tool. Buffer offers a tool called “Pablo” that allows you to create graphics within the app and will allow scheduling of this post also within the app. With access to the Pro plan, you will gain access to use RSS feeds as inputs as well as the Calendar feature.
What should I be concerned about?
Buffer offers some Instagram integration, but this integration is a tad misleading. Buffer reminds users to log into Instagram to post content. Essentially, the only automated function of these reminders is the reminder itself. Also, if you are a basic plan user, Buffer significantly limits the functionality of their app. For their basic users, they will only allow one social media account per platform, and will only allow you to schedule ten posts at a time. There is also a significant limit for their next step plan. This plan allows you to schedule 100 posts for ten profiles.
Social Oomph offers management of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
best social media automation tools social oomph
What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
Social Oomph integrates with a few different platforms including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The most powerful feature that Social Oomph provides is to track Twitter followers and keywords. These platform analytics provide quite a bit of information about your audience so that you can tailor your content to your audience. Social Oomph also allows your employees to submit content via email, which will allow you to avoid needing to add team members to your account. You will instead be able to review and approve content from your own login information.
What should I be concerned about?
Social Oomph severely limits its free users, only allowing connection with Twitter at the basic level. Complete automation only occurs at the professional plan level, which is a higher price point than many on this list. The professional plan runs $17.97 every two weeks.
5 – IFTTT
IFTTT is a platform that allows you to set up a number of triggers. The acronym stands for If This Then That. This means if a certain condition is met, then an action is performed.
best social media automation tools ifttt
Why is it one of the best social media automation tools?
IFTTT works on the formula of recipes. You set a trigger, whether it be a YouTube video published, a Tweet sent, or a new blog post on WordPress, and then set a result. The result indicates where this content moves. IFTTT has a huge variety of triggers and resulting actions. Recipes on IFTTT are extremely varied, and possibilities are endless with the trigger options.
What should I be concerned about?
Costs can start to get steep with this platform. There are only two levels of the plan, which start at about $1,200/year and do include unlimited triggers and actions. The only other option is to pay around $6,000 per year to customize your plan.
Sprout Social helps business users manage and analyze social media impacts across platforms.
best social media automation tools sprout social
Why is this one of the best social media automation tools?
Sprout Social follows the analytics protocol, providing its users with many different types of analytics and interactions. Google Analytics are an essential feature of what Sprout provides. They integrate this into their dashboard so that you don’t have to run to Google to find out why your traffic may have dropped. Team members may also be added to all plan levels. They also have options to automate your social media content via a Social Content Calendar. Sprout also can decide the optimal times to deliver your content if you have trouble deciding when to publish.
What should I be concerned about?
Sprout is one of those platforms that is on the more expensive side. While they do offer a 30-day free trial, they also start their pricing at $99 per user per month for their most basic plan without adding additional users. Sprout also lacks Pinterest, Instagram, and multiple Google+ page interfaces. These features may be available on one of the other tools mentioned previously.
CoSchedule is a more robust platform that allows for posting and scheduling in a drag and drop calendar format.
best social media marketing tools coschedule
Why is this one of the best tools for social media automation?
CoSchedule offers a drag and drop format calendar that allows you to categorize your posting. This tool also allows you to select evergreen content, which can be posted indefinitely. The tool will also select the most popular posts in your history and repost them for you. CoSchedule also has integration options with Buffer.
Why should I be concerned?
CoSchedule is similar to Sprout Social in that there is no option for a Free plan. The lowest cost plan offered by CoSchedule is $30 per month for 10 Social Profiles and one user account. In our experience, CoSchedule does require a lot of initial setup. There is a significant time investment up front in setting up the account and calendar. However, once set up, only minor alterations are required.


Should I be using Third Party content?
  • First, third party content is not content that you have to write yourself. You may be pressed for time in coming up with original content, but want to make sure that you are maintaining a consistent social media presence. That’s where third- party content comes in. Well curated third party content can reinforce your messages in your original content. B2B Marketing Solutions suggests that you make this a part of your marketing strategy because you want to be a trusted source of valuable information. Not all of this information has to come from content that you generate.
  • Second, third party content can add valuable information to your social media walls without you needing to write it. Social-tribe suggests that third party content can add value as long as it holds relevance to your target audience. Sharing someone else’s article can help you publish this valuable information for your readers, increase your credibility and also increase your followers.
  • Third, this falls into the category of making sure that your content isn’t just bombarding your followers with sales pitches. Neil Patel recommends that when sharing content to your social media accounts, 80% should be social, rather than sales.
  • The social content draws in your audience and makes sure that they’re not exhausted by a constant sales pitch, leading you to see more audience attrition.

Source: blog.dlvrit.com

Great Google Tools to Make Collaborating Online Easier

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Over the past 18 years of its short lifespan, Google has created over 140 products, here are some Google tools that most people don’t talk about much, but would be extremely handy to use in a wide range of situations.
Google Keep is a beautifully designed, visual note-taking app that can help you keep all your notes, to-do lists, reminders, images and all sorts of other tidbits of information organized and easy to view. The card-like interface makes it super intuitive to use, which you can customize any way you want by adding labels and colors.
Need to record some audio for a reminder? Or have a shopping list that you and your family members need to access and edit as you pick things up? Google Keep lets you do it all. You might just find that it’s one of the most useful note-taking apps out there.
Ever wished you could do a Google search for something according to what it looks like because you can’t for the life of you remember what it’s called? Well, Android users, you’re in luck—because Google Goggles is an image-driven search engine that actually lets you snap a photo and use it to search for information about it. (Sorry iPhone users, Google Goggles isn’t available on your platform!)
Just point your camera at a famous sculpture, a landmark at a specific location, a product you’re using, or anything else to see if Google Goggles has it included in its vast database. You can also use it on barcodes and QR codes to find more information about products as well as related products.
Google Spaces

Maybe you already use Google Drive and Gmail to connect and collaborate with others on all sorts of stuff, but you probably didn’t know that Google also has a dedicated tool made just for small group sharing. Google Spaces is a tool that you can use to create a new space for a group, invite who you want into them, have conversations based on what you share and find anything easily that was previously shared.
Similar to Trello, Google Spaces uses a card-based layout to keep it simple, functional and easy to use. And the best part is that you can use it from the regular desktop web plus take advantage of the handy-dandy iOS and Android apps for when you need to collaborate with others while you’re on the go. (There’s also a Chrome extension!)
If you’re a fan of Gmail, then you’ll love Inbox by Gmail — a tool Google developed based on everything known about how people use Gmail. It’s a slick, visual platform that makes it easy to view, organize, and respond to your email messages both on the web and on mobile devices with apps available for both iOS and Android.
In addition to making Gmail a lot easier to manage, other tools like reminders, bundles, highlights and a “snooze” button are worked into Inbox in a way that combines email management with other important tasks and organizational features. While there may be a slight learning curve to getting to know the platform and all it has to offer, going back to plain old Gmail would probably be out of the question once you’re familiar with how Inbox works.
source lifewire.com/little-known-google-tools-4118527

New Mapping Tools Create Content that Attracts Audience

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Innovations in modern cartography offer new tools for real estate professionals to connect with current and future clients.

Mapping technology has come a long way since the days Mapquest and Garmin ruled the lot. A host of open-data and proprietary tools offers real estate pros—both residential and commercial—new ways to share data about properties, local economic trends, and neighborhood amenities.

Free and low-cost products, including Leaflet, Google’s My Maps, CARTO Builder, and BatchGeo, can help you create custom maps of favorite neighborhood haunts, walking tours, or even comparable listings.

The results will surely get the attention of prospective clients, both online and offline.

Real estate professionals can take advantage of data that more and more municipalities are making publicly available about city services.

When hiring mapping professionals You need a mix of data scientist, designer, and geographer.

Mapping technology can also help real estate pros answer complex questions about their communities.

What if you want to know the specific locations in your community where a particular retail store will thrive based on socioeconomic factors and product demand? Or you may want to predict where future development may occur, so you’ll know where to concentrate your outreach efforts.

For questions such as these, the holy grail of mapping toolboxes may reside with Esri, a Redlands, Calif.–based company that owns the commercial licensing rights to Google Earth. Esri combines maps with other information such as census data, traffic counts, and consumer spending indices. The company uses that data to help real estate pros and their clients understand the market potential of an area.

Esri’s tools are integrated into the commercial segment of REALTORS Property Resource®.

The partnership allows users to finely tune their site selection analyses. “Let’s say a commercial real estate professional is working with a developer who is trying to find a location for a mixed-use community with apartments and retail space.

With a quick analysis of demographic, psychographic, and spending data, they can target areas with young, successful singles seeking urban lifestyles who spend their disposable income on dining out and shopping,” says Emily Line, vice president of commercial services at RPR. The presentation tools at RPR

Commercial allow users to predict how areas will develop and whether that growth looks sustainable according to demographic and economic statistics for the current state of the market as well as projections to 2020.

Big data can power decision-making from mapping large amounts of information in a way your clients can appreciate .

Source Meg White

Referral spam is compromising the accuracy of most Google Analytics reports!

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What Google referral spam is, how to identify it in your reports, methods to clean up historical reports and prevent referral spam from effecting reports in the future.

Starting in 2014, there was a full-frontal assault of fake referral spam masquerading as legitimate website visitors compromising the accuracy of our Google Analytics reports!
While we thought Google would fix it, a solution still has not arrived, and so we are on our own.

The problem was, and still is, most marketers don’t know what referral spam is, how to spot it, or how to remove it.

  • This presents a major problem when businesses and marketers begin using these inaccurate Google Analytics reports to make conversion rate optimization decisions on A/B tests, landing page optimization, and more.
  • Worse yet, many marketers are unknowingly presenting traffic numbers to bosses and stakeholders that could be off by up to 60%!
  • There are a few proven strategies to eliminate Google Analytics referral spam.

What Is Referral Spam?

  • The majority of referral spam never actually visits your website which is why some marketers refer to it as “Ghost” spam. Even though this traffic never visits your website it still appears in your reports as legitimate traffic affecting total sessions, bounce rate, time on site, conversion rates and more.
  • On small business websites, this traffic can account for over 60% of daily sessions which causes major problems in month-to-month reporting, A/B testing, or other conversion rate optimization tests.
  • If this traffic never visits your website, why does it show up in Google Analytics?
  • The spammers use a Google developer tool called the Measurement Protocol.
     Among other legitimate uses, this allows developers and businesses to track behavior of their customers from a wide variety of different offline data sources and send that raw data to their Google Analytics account. Unfortunately, this also opens the door for crafty spammers to force raw data into Analytics accounts by randomly attacking UA tracking codes, completely bypassing the website.

referral-spam

How to Identify Referral Spam

  • There are a lot of ways to identify referral spam but the quickest is to review your traffic reports by clicking Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
  • If the referring domain URL isn’t a big enough giveaway of the traffic source being spam, simply visiting the URL should remove all doubt.

How to remove Fake Traffic From Google Analytics?


Three filters will block most future traffic from domains which are currently known to send referral spam.

First filter click the Admin tab, select your Filtered View, click Filters, and enter a name for your filter keeping in mind there will be several.
In the Filter Pattern field, copy and paste the string below:

  • dailyrank|100dollars-seo|semalt|anticrawler|sitevaluation|buttons-for-website|buttons-for-your-website|-musicas*-gratis|best-seo-offer|best-seo-solution|savetubevideo|ranksonic|offers.bycontext|7makemoneyonline|kambasoft|medispainstitute
  • Since there is a character limit to the Filter Pattern field create a second filter: 127.0.0.1|justprofit.xyz|nexus.search-helper.ru|rankings-analytics.com|videos-for-your-business|adviceforum.info|video—production|success-seo|sharemyfile.ru|seo-platform|dbutton.net|wordpress-crew.net|rankscanner|doktoronline.no|o00.in
  • Third Filter: top1-seo-service.com|fast-wordpress-start.com|rankings-analytics.com|uptimebot.net|^scripted.com|uptimechecker.com

The fourth is a Hostname Filter.
  • This can be seen in your Network report by clicking Audience > Technology > Network and selecting the Hostname tab.
  • The Hostname Filter eliminates this spam from your reports by including only the traffic that reaches your website by requesting your actual domain name.
  • The difference here is you must select Include, choose Hostname for the Filter Field and enter your hostname in the Filter Pattern.

How Do I Clean Old Google Analytics Reports?

  • While the above mentioned filters will only fight future referral spam, you can still remove spam from historical reports using a single Custom Segment.
  • Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. Once there, click + Add Segment > + New Segment and recreate the four filters above as a single Custom Segment.
  • Click Conditions, and on the first filter select Hostname > Matches Regex and enter the hostname(s) you used in your fourth filter above.

Click the + Add Filter button.

  • Source > Matches Regex and paste the same list of spam domains from the first filter you created.
  • Click the OR button and repeat this filter two more times with the respective list of spam domains.

Notice the circular graph to the right reflect a smaller amount of traffic. This is the amount of site traffic that remains after all referral spam has been removed. Once you save this filter, you can apply it to any report and any time frame.



THE EASIER ALTERNATE METHOD

Google Analytics spam shows up with bogus referrers, events, and other junk data. Referral spam in web analytics reports has been around for a long time, but it started showing up in Google around the end of 2014. Google is working on the issue and seems to be blocking some of it, but new spam continues to crop up. This method will stop current spammers, and can be re-run again in the future as new spammers arise.

This tool will automatically insert filters to block new referral spam: https://www.quantable.com/ga-filter/spam-filter.php

It uses two different methods in combination:
  • Blocking analytics calls from sites other than your own (or other hosts you select, the tool will walk you through the sites calling your GA). This eliminates most of the so-called “ghost” referrals where your site was never involved in the measurement calls.
  • Explicitly blocking other spammers that get around the hostname-limitation method. Usually these are bots that actually are hitting your site and firing the GA sensor as normal but are still junk traffic that we’d all like to filter out. If you already have existing spam filters these new filters should not conflict with them.


ANOTHER ALTERNATE METHOD WITH MORE OPTIONS

  • This tool lets you automatically create and link referral spam filters to your Google Analytics profiles.
  • The list of spam sources is derived from friends at Lone Goat and Analytics Canvas.
  • To create and link these filters, you will need EDIT access in the Google Analytics accounts you want to modify.
  • This tool will only allow you to access privileged accounts.
  • Note that any existing filters with the names sa_Spam_filter_#N will be updated if there is a mismatch.




Sources:
www.simoahava.com/analytics/spam-filter-insertion-tool
blog.kissmetrics.com/removing-google-analytics-referral-spam
www.quantable.com/analytics/google-analytics-referral-spam-filter-wizard