Set Up for Success: The Best New Social Media Tools and How You Can Use Them

Every new year seems to bring a new assortment of social media apps with quirky names, but only a handful of these tools are actually helpful enough to make a real difference in terms of boosting your brand’s social media productivity. Below is a list of the best new social media tools that can help you create, curate, schedule and manage your social media content more efficiently.

Blab

The advent of breakthrough social apps such as Periscope and SnapChat has paved the way for other “in-the-moment” social media tools that enable users to participate in events as they are happening, and one of the most popular apps along these lines is Blab. Blab approaches video chatting from a unique angle by allowing multiple users to participate in a live chat simultaneously, and then opening this interface up for other viewers to watch the whole conversation.

In this respect, Blab is akin to an online talk show, but with the added bonus of allowing the viewers to chime in by submitting questions or otherwise participating in the discussion. Blab is currently being used for all kinds of different program formats including interviews, talk shows, debates, casual hangouts and live workshops.

Quuu.co

Savvy marketers recognize that publishing curated content is one of the best ways to connect with and retain their social media audience; the only drawback is that it can be awfully time-consuming to find just the right content to share. Quuu.co has developed a unique solution to address this issue: Rather than relying upon an automated program for content curation (which can be hit-or-miss), Quuu.co uses real human beings to select and then return hand-picked content that fits your chosen categories based on what you know will best suit your audience.

Quuu.co is designed to work seamlessly with Buffer, the uber-popular social media management application that helps you select, schedule and share content across multiple social platforms. Quuu.co sends content directly to your Buffer account, so you won’t have to worry about managing yet another publishing dashboard. Through Quuu.co, you can schedule and publish high-quality, relevant, hand-picked content that will enable your brand to retain its authenticity while maximizing efficiency as well.

Notifier

It is a good idea to create content that mentions certain influencers (essentially giving them a “shout out”), but without connecting with and notifying that influencer that they’ve been mentioned in your content, you don’t really receive any additional exposure for your brand.

Notifier simplifies this process by automatically searching for and retrieving the Twitter handles of the people or brands that are mentioned in your blog posts (just paste the URL of your post into the Notifier interface to start the process). Notifier will also create a tweet that you can customize and send to let them know that they’ve been mentioned in your content. This can save you a ton of time, and give you more opportunities to connect with the heavy-hitters in your industry.

Pablo 2.0

If fiddling with Photoshop is not your cup of tea, you’ll love Pablo 2.0, an image creation and editing tool with social sharing built right in. Through Pablo 2.0, you can choose the type of graphics format you want to display (e.g., horizontal, vertical, square, etc.), decide what text (if any) you want to include with your image, and then publish or schedule the final product to Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and/or Twitter in a snap.

Pablo 2.0 streamlines the process of creating and sharing images through your various social media channels, making it easy for you to use this essential visual medium to connect with your audience and reinforce your brand’s message.

Crate

Crate is a highly useful app that allows you to build an online repository of various blogs, domains, keywords, topics, influencers and other noteworthy sources that relate to the theme of your brand. As your “digital library” continues to grow, Crate will begin curating content based on social graph data that matches the most effective content types with the most appropriate social networks.

While Crate does not offer human-assisted content curation like Quuu.co, it still does a very handy job of fetching relevant content based on your specific criteria, which can save you the time and energy of having to hunt it down yourself.