Category Archives: Blog

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Some very cool and free resources for your next project

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Free Media Sources:

  • Archive.org Community Audio – Public domain music and spoken word.
  • Creative Commons Search – Search media sites across the internet for content made available for free reuse.
  • The Flickr Commons – The key goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world’s public photography archives.
  • FreeSound – Public domain sound effects.
  • Free Music Archive – Creative Commons and Public Domain music.
  • Pixabay: Free Images – Free, downloadable stock images (except for the first line of Shutterstock images on each search page).
  • Project Gutenberg – Project Gutenberg offers over 53,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.
  • Unsplash – The internet’s source of freely-usable images. Powered by creators everywhere.
  • Wikimedia Commons – Images, sound, and video available for free reuse.

FOUR trends in video culture that signal bigger shifts

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At a glance, South Korean creator RuiCovery resembles any number of other creators who upload cover songs to YouTube. But one key difference sets her apart: Rui is played by an actor with an AI-generated face designed by the Seoul-based IT startup Dob Studio.

Rui’s success represents a moment of major change in technology, creativity, and culture — and AI is only one part of it. The shift caters to casual creators and those with advanced technical skills alike, resulting in more creative opportunities and new ways for audiences to engage with what they’re


YouTube creator Airrack guides viewers through the YouTube Culture and Trends Report, exploring new research, YouTube data, and creator interviews, unpacking the fan trends and technological advancements fueling a cultural shift in content creation and consumption.

To better understand the changing landscape of video creation and consumption, we looked at hundreds of video trends, spoke to creators and experts, and ran surveys across 14 countries. The resulting 2023 YouTube Culture and Trends Report will help marketers understand where video culture is today, where it’s headed, and how to win in this new digital environment.

Video Trend No. 1: Gen Z is blurring the line between creator and audience

The rise of online fan communities has had a massive impact on pop culture. In 2023, thanks to the availability of advanced tech tools, fans have a more active role in shaping culture than ever. Fandom is more layered, and it’s shifting not only how people experience and participate in video culture but how they perceive their role. A survey conducted by Ipsos in 14 countries reported that 41% of Gen Z describe themselves as video content creators.1 From meme makers to commentators to professional fans with dedicated followings, Gen Zers have an unprecedented opportunity to influence what they love. And it’s not just Gen Z: 40% of all respondents (online 18- to 44-year-olds) described themselves as video content creators.2

41% of Gen Z survey respondents described themselves as video content creators

Source: Google/Ipsos, YouTube Trends Survey, Global (AU, BR, CA, EG, FR, DE, IN, ID, JP, KR, MX, SA, U.K., U.S.), n=25,892, online adults, age 18–44, May 2023.

Filmmaker Kane Parsons, 17, experienced this firsthand when so many other YouTube creators riffed on and analyzed his short film, The Backrooms — one going so far as to recreate it in Minecraft — that the original film amassed over 49 million views and became a top trending YouTube video. A24, the production company behind the Oscar-winning film “Moonlight” and HBO’s “Euphoria,” took notice, leading to his forthcoming big-screen directorial debut.

Conversely, major industry moments can be opportunities for commentators and professional fans to contribute their original perspectives. Consider a fashion critic who covers the Met Gala. By adding insight through deep expertise and original perspectives, creators can draw many fans looking for deeper dives: 54% of surveyed people prefer to watch creators breaking down a major event (such as the Oscars or the Grammys) rather than the event itself.3

Brands tend to benefit from fan communities as well. Hundreds of fan-creators took to YouTube to post their own riffs on Burger King’s “Whopper, Whopper” ad. The memes and remixes drove over 100 million views on YouTube videos related to the song,4 an outpouring that was still going strong six months after the ad aired.

Campaigns using two or more video formats were more likely to see ad recall and brand awareness lift than those using only one.

Fitness creator Cassey Ho has built a community of 8.6 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, Blogilates, by sharing workout routines, running tips, Pilates videos, and more. Last year, she pivoted her content to Shorts, using the format to offer a more personal, behind-the-scenes look at her athleisure brand. Ho, who started her channel in 2009, gained more than half of her lifetime views since adopting the Shorts strategy at the beginning of 2022.6 Research suggests she’s not the only one seeing results: 90% of people surveyed said they have watched content from a particular creator or artist across different formats (such as short form, long form, podcasts, live streams) over the past 12 months.7

This shift in behaviour is great news for brands, which now have more ways to show up across all of the screens and formats where people are watching. Google AI-powered ad campaigns on YouTube, such as Video reach campaigns, help marketers create a mix of video ad formats to reach more viewers and drive better, more cost-efficient results. In fact, campaigns using two or more video formats were more likely to see ad recall and brand awareness lift than those using only one.8

Creators testing multi-language dubbed videos saw over 15% of their watch time come from views in the video’s nonprimary language.

Experiential features like closed captions and multi-language audio allow audiences to tailor their viewing experiences to their preferences. Creators are using captions in fresh ways: to add context, deliver inside jokes, or simply provide Easter eggs for interested viewers. Closed captions have also contributed to the rise of “silent vlogs,” which use subtitles to add commentary without interrupting the immersiveness of the video. Not only were users open to watching without sound, but videos with “silent vlog” in the title garnered 24 million views in 2022.10

Meanwhile, YouTube’s multi-language audio feature lets anyone upload different audio tracks to the same video. And for ads specifically, we’re experimenting with an AI-powered offering that can dub English video ads into nine languages, with more coming soon. The option opens up a new world of possibilities for creators, brands, and viewers hoping to reach wider audiences. The platform’s most subscribed individual creator, Mr. Beast, recently shared how he dubbed his most popular videos into 11 languages to cater to more of his international audience. Creators testing multi-language dubbed videos saw over 15% of their watch time come from views in the video’s nonprimary language.11

54% of surveyed people said they follow a creator who creates content in a language other than their own.

Source: Google/Ipsos, YouTube Trends Survey, Global (AU, BR, CA, EG, FR, DE, IN, ID, JP, KR, MX, SA, U.K., U.S.), n=25,892, online adults, age 18–44, May 2023.

Last month, Korean singer Midnatt launched his song “Masquerade” in six languages, even using AI to enhance pronunciation and make his vocals sound more natural in each of his nonnative languages. Audiences support these innovations: 54% of surveyed people said they follow a creator who creates content in a language other than their own.12 For brands, dub tracks can mean reaching new audiences without the need for huge production budgets.

60% of audiences agree that they are open to watching content from creators who use AI to generate their content.

Source: Google/Ipsos, YouTube Trends Survey, Global (AU, BR, CA, EG, FR, DE, IN, ID, JP, KR, MX, SA, U.K., U.S.), n=25,892 online adults, age 18–44, May 2023.

AI-generated moments resonate because creators apply their unique perspectives to bring concepts to life for their viewers. For some, this can mean turning to the technology for creative prompts, such as asking for a makeup routine to follow. For musical artists, it can mean producing visuals for their own audio tracks, allowing fans to experience their work in new ways. These innovative use cases serve as templates for how AI tools might be used in the future and help to demystify them for broader audiences. There have been more than 1.7 billion views of YouTube videos about generative AI tools so far in 2023.14

From creators with AI-generated avatars to moments driven by fan participation, video culture is moving toward an even more democratized landscape. And it’s moving fast. There is more appetite among viewers for interesting and envelope-pushing work, and more ways to make that work accessible to them across devices — even across language barriers. With fewer steps to get started and more venues for collaboration, creators, audiences, and brands have more opportunities to interact, shaping the future of digital video along the way.

Twelve Reasons Why every Business Needs Pinterest Marketing

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When it comes to marketing your business, social media engagement is the best way to go. The question is, which social media would you go for? If you have already created a Facebook page, then you then you have made a great start. Your next step should be pinning with the queen of visual social media networks, Pinterest.

Shareaholic.com reveals that Pinterest has increased its traffic driving capacity up to 7.10% from 4.79% in just three months (from December 2013 to March 2014). This 48% increase has a huge effect for brand exposure through digital marketing in products such as books, magazines, antiques, services, and even IT/computing.

Pinterest is a social media platform based mostly on images. For more than four years, you increase your social network by pins of uploaded, saved, and shared photos which are then organized into pinboards. It can be compared to Facebook as it has an increasing number of fans reaching over 70 million and still continues to grow. If you want your business to be big, here’s why you should go ahead and start pinning and start some Pinterest marketing.

Reasons to start Pinterest marketing

Here are some top tips to start Pinterest marketing today!

 1. Strengthen Your Brand

With Pinterest, you could personalize your page to your business name and your logo as your profile picture to reach maximum exposure every time you pin an image. You could also add a paragraph describing the nature of your business including your business website, and even link this to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. If your business involves different types of services or products, you could categorize them into different pinboards for easier navigation.

2. Drive Heavy Traffic

To drive traffic for your website, Pinterest provides a hover button which leads directly to your site. This is beneficial for users to pin images directly from your site and check your site as well. You do not even have to worry on how to use Pinterest for your business, Pinterest has a guided editor which helps you navigate through the pages without breaking a sweat.

3. Market Research

Pinterest gives you an overview of the trend in the market and what appeals to customers most. You may think that most Pinterest users are women but these women still have husbands and male friends who they would want to give gifts to or shop for. By the way they build pinboards and pin things, you see what makes them tick as a customer and the other products that are trending.

Photo by Bunches and Bits {Karina} via Flickr

4. Gain New Customers

Once your pin has started to gain popularity in various pinboards, you still get a hefty amount of views even when these are pinned or not. Imagine a billboard along a highway, these are seen by the public and could still win them over as long as it stays there. If pinned and shared by various users, you have a higher chance of gaining new customers in the process.

5. Be An Authority In Your Line Of Business

Since you are able to do market research, you can change and focus your ways on how to be an authority in Pinterest. With the right amount and quality of photos and descriptions, you could easily target these descriptions to what most new Pinterest users would want.

6. Free Marketing From Your Fans

Just like Instagram and Facebook, Pinterest makes use of the followers and images that need to increase their popularity. The more the photo or image is interesting, the higher the chances of being pinned by other users. You don’t have to spend more money on a separate content marketing strategy, all you have to invest on is the right description and the quality image that you could pin.

7. Customer Engagement Through Contests

You could increase customer engagement through contests. With Pinterest, you could try hosting a photo contest of the best photo with your business logo on them. This will definitely initiate a pinning spree all over the world with your logo which is an instant marketing for your product. Your brand is being shared not only to you but to their friends as well which are potential or current customers of your product.

Photo by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

8. Widen Product Exposure

This has been said a number of times above, but the point is Pinterest is often linked to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media websites so expect to have numerous customers with just one pin.

9. Boost The Sales

Scattering photos all over Pinterest increases exposure to different pinners and boosts your product sales. You may create different pinboards for every target audience you have which, with the right board name, entice these potential customers to patronize your business. Also, part of the sales process should also include the company’s target, vision, and mission.

10. Longer Post Exposure

According to WebpageFX, the average lifespan of a Pinterest pin is three and a half months, which is 1,600 times longer than a Facebook post. Overtime, as your pin gets to be shared with other users, it still continues to spread like wildfire. You don’t have to repeat the pin over and over again to achieve this exposure. Wisemetrics.com shares that a Tweet achieves the peak of its views and retweets in 24 minutes and then dies, a Facebook post could live 90 nute half-life at best, but a Pinterest pin lives for forever. Pinterest makes it easier to search for your product not only on your page but also on other pages as well.

Photo by Kris Olin via Flickr

11. Excellent SEO Strategy

With the way Pinterest works, keywords are still important. If you google keywords, most of the time a pinterest page comes up with numerous pinboards in it containing the product or the search item.

12. Free Sales Promotion

You don’t need to hire anyone to do the pinning for you. Get a great shot, work on the words, and post it online. Viola! Free marketing! You don’t need to spend a dime on this and this works 24/7.

Why use Pinterest for your business? Pinterest is not just about fashion and other girly stuff. With the rate pinning takes your business, you might just need to start pinning it!

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How to Keep Your Social Media Accounts Secure

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The original intent of social media was to bring people together. We share our lives with our far-away loved ones and friends and make new friends across time zones and cultural boundaries.

Sound good? If this was the only outcome of millions of humans sharing cat videos and baby photos, the world would be a sweeter place. However, with this intent came something more unfriendly—to put it mildly.

Hackers, marketing companies, and more besides, take and share your informational data for a variety of reasons.  Extreme examples like Cambridge Analytica using your likes and dislikes to influence an election should be enough to give the everyday user a pause for thought.

Let’s take a look at the kinds of security issues that come from social media, and how you can keep yourself and your data safe in a time when everyone is online all the time.

How Is Social Media a Security Risk?

These days, almost everyone with an internet connection or mobile device has at least one social media account. Their methods of use may differ from reading the news to sharing their lives, to updating their professional resume. Regardless of usage, social media is a part of the fabric of modern-day life.

What used to the content of private conversations is more often than not shared in a public space such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Multitudes of strangers have access to your opinions, comments, political leanings, and family concerns.

Bearing this in mind, it’s important to learn how to protect one’s data and privacy while feeling free enough to learn and share on these platforms.

With privacy and security a top priority, enabling best practices for safely using social media will give you peace of mind.

Start with a Strong Password

Password managers are your best friend when it comes to social media protection. A password manager assists in creating random strings of characters that are unique, hard to crack, and also hard to remember. Bearing that in mind, the manager stores these in a safe account that is easily accessible.

Trusted password manager apps are everywhere, but the top ones include:

While you may have numerous accounts that require passwords, these apps keep them all in one place, while diversifying the actual passwords themselves. It is recommended to never use the same password for more than one account. Tools such as Chrome Password Manager will generate unique strings of characters for you

Security Concerns on Facebook

Facebook is the behemoth of all social media.

With an estimated two billion users daily, it can be impossible to avoid. Even if you’ve decided to limit your use of the platform, it can be very difficult to disengage from it entirely. Most users of social media assume others have a presence on Facebook. Think about all the ways in which family, friends, and colleagues use it. Even cultural and entertainment institutions rely on Facebook to announce important events.

Facebook has become our default, despite its faults and shifting demographics, everyone seems to be on it.

Now consider all the problems that arise from this fact. Exposes in the media and documentary films have uncovered widespread hacking and abuse of personal information. Cambridge Analytica harvested personal data on over 50 million Facebook users and used it to alter the course of a democratic election. There’s a saying that ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you ARE the product.’

We are still a long way away from any solid implementation of global data rights as human rights law. Therefore, it is up to you, the user, to know how to protect yourself and your digital identity.

Easy Security for your Facebook account:

  • Create a complex Password & store in a Password Manager.
  • If you’re checking your Facebook account from any device other than your home computer or personal cell phone, do not check ‘Keep Me Logged In’.
  • Set up 2FA: Two-Factor Authentication ensures only you can log into your account. This can be enabled inside the ‘Settings’ menu under ‘Setup’.
  • Only accept friend requests from people you already know in the real world, or are within two degrees of separation from your personal network.
  • Report suspicious activity to Facebook.
  • Block accounts that harass or attack you on comment threads.

Next up, Twitter!

Twitter has revolutionized the way we absorb news and media.

 

With its short bursts of journalism, to its hilarious use of puns and wit, to its unfortunate abuses of fringe ideology and ignorance, this social media platform has changed the game when it comes to information.

You no longer need to scour an entire news blog to follow a story that means a lot to you. Simply locate the journalist on Twitter and follow her, or find the relevant hashtag for the latest updates.

Twitter is also great for self-promotion of your small business, building a network of trusted colleagues, and promoting brands and business practices relevant to your interests.

With the great ability to communicate also comes great risks.

Here are some valuable ways to protect your identity, location and data on Twitter:

  • As with Facebook, begin by creating a complex Password & store in a Password Manager.
  • 2FA is your best friend from now on! Two Factor Authentication should be used wherever and whenever it is offered on a social media platform
  • Go into ‘Settings & Privacy’ and choose ‘Protect my tweets’ for added privacy. This way, only your approved followers can see what you choose to share and say on Twitter.
  • Monitor all third-party apps that have access to your Twitter account. Some of these allow data access, therefore it is wise to limit any third-party capabilities.
  • Don’t accept or click Direct Messages from unknown accounts. They may be phishing attacks or viruses.
  • Don’t forget to log out of any devices that are not your home computer or personal cell phone!

Onward to LinkedIn

Chances are if you’ve ever searched for a job in the last ten years or more, you’ve got a LinkedIn profile.

It’s the world standard for professional networking. This also means it hosts a huge amount of personal data from your location to your professional network and education background. That can be quite tempting for a hacker, identity thief, or third party marketer.

LinkedIn is a haven for phishing attacks, scam artists promising ‘dream jobs’, and the usual hackers that abound all over the internet. With your professional life on the line, you can’t afford not to put privacy practices into place on this platform that is the global standard for resume hosting.

What you can do on LinkedIn:

  • Starting with the password, begin by creating a complex Password & store in a Password Manager.
  • Think carefully about what data you wish to share on LinkedIn. Only post the most essential professional details about yourself. If you already have a resume or CV up, go over it and remove anything that seems like oversharing.
  • Check what third-party apps are authorized to connect your LinkedIn. Sometimes these are outside job boards or old application processes. Delete any that are not in use.
  • Be wary of direct messages from unknown recruiters or countries where you’ve never done business. Practice internet savvy and don’t trust every message that comes into your inbox!
  • Keep track of where you apply for jobs and how you’ve shared your LinkedIn profile.

Picture Perfect Privacy: Instagram

Who doesn’t love pretty pictures?

Instagram’s popularity has soared in recent years. What used to be a niche photo-sharing site, has beaten the old standard Flickr and risen to the top in popularity. It’s platform encourages the exploration of beautiful landscapes, fabulous parties, and gorgeous fashions. It also allows for story-sharing, hashtag following, linking to other profiles, and conversation threads.

The good thing about Instagram is that you can make your profile completely private from prying eyes. This doesn’t stop your handle from being linked, however, if the average user, or bot, who is not in your curated followers list has no ability to see your photos. For a platform with more than 1 billion active users, privacy is a concern.

How to make sure no one is accessing your IG account:

  • As with all other social media platforms, set your password with a unique string of numbers and characters.
  • Enable 2FA (two-factor authentication).
  • Consider changing your passwords every few months as an extra precaution against fraud. Do NOT use the password twice.
  • Monitor any third-party apps you may have already approved, and disable any that are not in use.
  • Do not geo-tag your photos. Disable geotagging that allows your location to be shown when you post a photograph.
  • Do not hashtag your location unless absolutely necessary. For example, if you’re posting a photo of a hotel where you stayed a few months ago, that may not be leaking sensitive information. But if you’re currently on vacation and away from your home—which is now empty—you may want to re-think posting that Instagram photo.

Staying Safe Online

Following these basic instructions for security and privacy is good practice for making them the normal way you go about using social media.

As you can see, most of them employ common sense and good password implementation. Familiarize yourself with the unique differences of each social media platform your information is on, and make the adjustments necessary for a safe user experience.

In the latest documentary, The Great Hack, the protagonist Wheatland called for Facebook to be regulated as a utility and said: “every company is a data company today, and how that data is ethically managed needs to spread through all companies.”

The reality of strong regulations is a long way off. As social media dominates our intellectual and emotional landscape, we have to be vigilant to protect ourselves whilst still be able to enjoy sharing our lives with, and learning from, others across the world.

Here are some great resources for your business.

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We at SuccessMarketing.ca want to share some websites and resources that we found helpful

What tools do you use to get your online marketing work done?

Can you do all the same work of a digital marketer, and do it for free?

The list of tools you use—often referred to as a marketing stack—probably covers a variety of different uses and needs, everything from social media marketing to content to email and lots more.

Is it possible to have all these great tools without paying a cent?

It was a fun challenge to come up with a way to build a $0 marketing stack, to find free alternatives to popular paid tools and services. I’m grateful for all the amazing companies out there that offer such value for so little. Here’s the list I came up with for free alternatives to paid tools. I’d love to know what you think!

What’s in the stack?

The $0 Marketing Stack: Free Alternatives to Paid Tools

For a quick overview, here are the tools I found that seemed to be great, free options for some popular paid services.

  1. Buffer
  2. Canva
  3. Google Analytics
  4. Hotjar
  5. Simply Measured
  6. Open Site Explorer
  7. Charlie
  8. HubSpot Email Marketing and HubSpot CRM
  9. WordPress
  10. Crowdfire
  11. Medium
  12. Wistia
  13. SumoMe
  14. Segment
  15. Peek
  16. Google Scholar
  17. Google Trends
  18. Blog Topic Generator
  19. Content Idea Generator
  20. Readability
  21. Hemingway
  22. Onpage Optimization Tool
  23. After the Deadline
  24. Readability Test Tool
  25. Save Publishing
  26. Followerwonk
  27. Latest.is
  28. Tweriod
  29. Must Be Present
  30. Conversation Score
  31. Wolfram Alpha Facebook report
  32. LikeAlyzer
  33. Fanpage Karma
  34. Facebook Page Barometer
  35. Quicksprout
  36. Website Grader
  37. SharedCount
  38. Newsle
  39. Rapportive
  40. MentionMapp
  41. Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

1. Social Media Scheduling: Buffer

buffer

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Sprout Social, MeetEdgar

Perhaps our best time-saving tip for social media marketing is scheduling posts ahead of time for your social profiles. You can batch the social media marketing process: Do all your curating and composing all in one go, then spread those updates out across the next day or week.

How we use Buffer: The forever free plan at Buffer lets you connect a profile from each network (one from Facebook, one from Twitter, etc.) and to schedule ahead 10 posts for each network. If you share three posts per day, that means you can stay three days ahead all the time.

We’ve found a lot of value in the hand-picked content suggestions (thanks to Courtney who finds all that great content!), which are easy to read then add.

Also free:

  • Planly (free for 1 user and 2 social channels)

2. Design: Canva

Canva

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Photoshop, InDesign

Over 2 million people trust Canva to help with creating images for social media, blog posts, and practically any other use you can imagine.

How we use Canva: The optimized sizes and built-in templates make it fast and easy to create tall pictures for Pinterest, rectangular ones for Twitter, square for Facebook or Instagram, and any size in between. We find Pablo (another free alternative) to be great for Twitter-sized images of 1,024 pixels by 512 pixels, and Canva to work really well for all else.

Also free:

3. Real-time Analytics: Google Analytics

Google Analytics real time stats

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Chartbeat

Google Analytics does pretty much everything in terms of tracking the traffic to your website. It’s a huge, monstrous amount of info, generously given away for free.

How we use Google Analytics: As a social media marketing team, we appreciate the ease with which we can see traffic from the different networks (Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals). We can check the engaged reading time by looking at Time on Page. And for the real-time stats of who’s on our site right now, we can simply click on Real-Time > Overview.

Also free:

  • Go Squared (free for the first 100 visitors and 1,000 data points)
  • MixPanel (free for 25,000 events per month)

4. Website optimization: Hotjar

Hotjar analytics

Great, paid options if you can swing it: KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg

Let’s say you’re curious how your visitors are actually using your website—where they click, how far they scroll, etc. Tools like Hotjar can show you exactly what your visitors are doing, via heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and visitor recordings. Hotjar also has options to analyze your funnel and to insert messages and surveys to your visitors.

How we use Hotjar: User research can be incredibly powerful stuff. I find great value in seeing how someone interacts with blog posts. How much of the post do they read? Where do they pause? What do they click? Seeing all this information helps me design my posts in a clearer way.

Also free:

5. Reports: Simply Measured

twitter followers report

Great, paid option if you can swing it: SumAll Reports

Simply Measured offers enterprise-level analytics and management for big brands and their social efforts. It has a wide array of free tools for the rest of us, too.

Among Simply Measured’s reports are these:

  1. Twitter Follower Report
  2. Twitter Customer Service Analysis
  3. Facebook Fan Page Report
  4. Facebook Content Analysis
  5. Facebook Competitive Analysis
  6. Facebook Insights Report
  7. Instagram User Report
  8. Social Traffic Report
  9. Traffic Source Report
  10. Google+ Page Report
  11. Vine Analysis

Phew! That’s a lot of reports!

How to use Simply Measured: Each of these reports costs no money, although Simply Measured will ask for a Twitter follow or a Facebook mention in exchange for the free report. You can save loads of time in pulling reports from this one location as you seek to gain insight on where your social media efforts have been going lately. They’ve got all six major social networks covered: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Also free:

6. SEO: Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Moz Pro

is a great free tool for checking your domain and page authority and also for checking how many links you are getting and from which source. You can also check your competition. But the free version only gives you 3 reports per day. Signing up offers unlimited reporting on all your links, keywords and competitors.

How to use Open Site Explorer: Plug your blog’s URL into Open Site Explorer to see the high-level stats like page authority and incoming links. You can also click over to the Just-Discovered tab to see recent links and Top Pages to see which pages on your site get the most links.

Also free:

7. CRM: Charlie

Charlie app

Great, paid option if you can swing it: SalesForce

A lot of the best CRM tools (Customer Relationship Management) help you stay abreast of your current and future customers. Think of a futuristic address book. The best ones are loaded with features and information. Charlie is a bit of a quick-and-easy hack to get to know a person really well.

How to use Charlie: Intended as a tool to help you prep for meeting new people, Charlie gives you a full run-down of a person—social media profiles, biography, interests, big news, etc.—by looking at your upcoming calendar or running an email address. If you’re wanting info on a single person ad-hoc, simply enter their email address into Charlie, and they’ll tell you everything.

Also free:

8. Lead generation and pop up tool: HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot CRM

HubSpot Marketing Free

HupSpot Marketing Free allows marketers to easily generate email leads from their website with a free pop up tool.

How to use HubSpot Marketing Free: You can gain a lot of great information about your leads from HubSpot Marketing Free. This pop up tool quickly gathers email addresses from your website and provides key data points like employer and which pages your leads have visited. And if you’re wondering which pages are converting at higher rates than others, it can help with that, too.

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Cirrus Insight

Also free:

9. Landing Pages: WordPress

WordPress pages

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Unbounce, LeadPages

For those who are running their website or blog via WordPress, perhaps the fastest and easiest way to set up a landing page is simply to create a new page. If you blog with WordPress, the blog content you create falls into Posts. The static content for landing pages—“Download our ebook,” “Sign up for our webinar,” etc.—can be made quite easily via Pages.

How to use WordPress: Build a new landing page in WordPress, and use this as the focal point of your social media ad campaign or your social media updates. Certain plugins like WooDojo even let you hide the content in your sidebar for particular pages, which could be a great option for minimizing the look of your page.

Also free:

  • Unbounce free plan (includes Unbounce branding)

10. Twitter management: Crowdfire

Crowdfire

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Crowdfire premium

Twitter has been so generous to open up its app to developers to make some really great tools. Sure, you can manage your Twitter profile directly via Twitter (an always free option), or you can try out tools like Just Unfollow, which allows for bulk sorting and filtering of your followers, along with insights into the demographics of the people in your audience.

How to use Just Unfollow: One way that many experts recommend to keep your Twitter following count in line with your Twitter follower count is to routinely check to see which accounts are following you back and to remove the ones that aren’t. With Just Unfollow, you can do this quickly and easily all from one page—and even whitelist the unfollowers whom you’d like to keep following.

Also free:

11. Blogging: Medium

Medium

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Ghost

It feels a bit funny to list Medium as a tool (it’s really more of a network or social media site), but when it comes to starting a new blog as cheaply and quickly as possible, Medium can’t be beat.

How to use Medium: Many young startups kick off their blog at Medium, where they enjoy a built-in audience from the start and have networking tools to help their content spread. Plus, one of Medium’s newest features is an email newsletter where you can automatically get in touch with people who follow you by sharing your latest articles.

Also free:

12. Video: Wistia

wistia

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Wistia Pro, Vimeo Pro

Once you’ve created an amazing video to share on social media or your website, where will you put it? The default seems to be YouTube, which is quick and easy but comes with less control and potentially some unrelated ads or suggestions. Wistia is made for marketers’ videos because the player keeps people on your page—or sends them precisely where you want them to go next.

How to use Wistia: After you’ve uploaded your video, you can hop into the settings and add things like call-to-action buttons or email capture formsat the end of the video. Wistia also makes it easy to view heatmaps and viewing trends of your videos, like how far most people get through your video, when they pause or click, etc.

Also free:

13. Share buttons: SumoMe Share

SumoMe

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Easy Social Share Buttons

The ubiquitous share buttons you see along the side of blog posts, many of them come from SumoMe. The any-website buttons (you don’t have to run a WordPress blog to use them) are part of the SumoMe suite of website products. If you’re okay with some SumoMe branding, you can add the buttons for free to any page and customize the networks that appear by default.

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How to use SumoMe Share: SumoMe gives you a lot of control over the appearance of the share buttons, both in which buttons are displayed and where on the page they’ll sit. One of the great features also is that they look good on mobile devices, so you maintain a great way to encourage sharing no matter where your audience is reading.

Also free:

14. Analytics: Segment

segment

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Usability Tools

I’ve heard Segment described as the one and only interface you’ll ever need for all your third-party apps. And I sure do see it recommended a lot. From what I can gather, Segment makes it easy for anyone—engineer or not—to connect new software to your website; once the Segment snippet is added, you can connect other apps like MailChimp, Google Analytics, etc. just by clicking around in your Segment dashboard. Segment handles all the visitor data for you.

How to use Segment: Rob Sobers put together a really handy guide to how he’s set up Segment for his SaaS business.

15. Testing: Peek

Peek by usertesting

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Optimizely, User Testing

When it comes to understanding how people are using your website—A/B testing, user testing, that sort of thing—there are some really fantastic paid options that can give you lots of insights. There’s also Peek, a free tool from User Testing that lets you see and hear a five-minute video of a real person using your website.

How to use Peek: For first-time insights, you may wish to have a person go  through your website or blog from the home page. Later on, you might ask for someone to test out a certain flow through your website by starting someone on a landing page. The tests take about 2-3 days to complete, and you can run three Peek tests every month.

Also free:

Even More Free Marketing Tools!

We went hunting for even more top free marketing tools in a variety of marketing categories. These tools – all quick hits you can get started with easily – focus on everything from research and writing to benchmarking and analyzing. Here’s hoping you find the perfect shortcut for your work!

Free Marketing Research Tools

We’ll start at the beginning: researching topics, sites and ideas.

16. Google Scholar

I don’t know why more people don’t talk about Google Scholar, but I love this tool for researching science-heavy articles and digging into emerging studies. It limits your search to articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Pair it with a Google Alert to get amazing research on your topics of interest delivered right to your inbox.

Google Scholar

See what the world is searching for and how interest in concepts has changed over time with Google Trends. For example, I feel like I’m suddenly hearing about “growth hacker” and “growth hacking.” Are you, too? I input those terms into Google Trends and it looks like there is a sudden new interest in the concept.

Google Trends

18. Blog Topic Generator

Stumped for ideas? Give HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator a few nouns that describe your content areas and it’ll spit out a week’s worth of post ideas.

Blog Topic Generator

19. Content Idea Generator

Enter a keyword for a fun, irreverent suggestion from Portent’s Content Idea Generator.

Title Generator

Free Reading and Writing Tools

These tools offer help with readability, keyword density and spelling and grammar.

20. Readability

Drag the Readability bookmarklet to your toolbar to convert any content on the web into a simple, easy-to-read format with an estimate of how long it’ll take you. Also check out the other bookmarklet options here, including one that sends longer content to your Kindle to read later.

Readability format

21. Hemingway

Simple, clear writing – we all strive for it. Get a little help with Hemingway. Paste a passage into the app and you’ll get an analysis that  highlights overly dense passages, unnecessary adverbs and more.

Hemingway app

22. Onpage Optimization Tool

This free onpage optimization tool from Internet Marketing Ninjas is a one-stop look at what’s going on a specific page of your site. Toss in a URL and see stats on keyword density, internal and external links and more.

Onpage Optimization

23. After the Deadline

A Chrome extension, After the Deadline checks spelling, style, and grammar wherever you go on the web.

After the Deadline

24. Readability Test Tool

Enter a web address or a block of text into the Readability Test Tool for an easy-to-understand analysis of your content. This tools measures a ton of different readability scores, and does a good job of explaining each one.

Readability Test Tool

Free Twitter Marketing Tools

These tools help you maximize your Twitter presence, from timing to sharing to analysis.

25. Save Publishing

Instantly find passages under 140 characters with Save Publishing, a handy bookmarklet that highlights tweetable passages on your screen. Post to Twitter with one click (or Buffer simply by highlighting a passage and clicking the Buffer extension)

Save Publishing

26. Followerwonk

We hope you’ve already heard of Followerwonk, one of Buffer’s many partners in amazing social media data. In addition to offering lots of super useful data about timing on Twitter, Followerwonk also has some other neat Twitter features, like the ability to compare followers of different accounts like so.

Followerwonk

27. Latest.is

It’s not breaking news. It’s not nonsense hashtags. Latest.is is an automatically generated list of interesting links on Twitter, surfaced through an algorithm that focuses on “the people that always tweet the best links – first” (no, it doesn’t tell you who they are).

Latest.is

28. Tweriod

Tweriod analyzes your account to show you the best times to tweet for more exposure and replies. Bonus: Once you get your peak times, you can sync your Buffer account with them!

Tweriod

29. Must Be Present

A free tool from Sprout Social, Must Be Present calculates how often and how quickly you respond to comments and questions on Twitter (in exchange for your email address and a bit of other info).

Must Be Present

Free Facebook Marketing Tools

These tools analyze one or more Facebook pages to deliver an analysis or report on your activities – particularly important as Facebook is always changing.

30. Conversation Score

Discover any Facebook Page’s influence, engagement and performance with Conversation Score.

cscore

31. Wolfram Alpha Facebook report

To analyze your own Facebook account and get lots of interesting data about your connection, the language you use, the times of day you post and more, try Wolfram Alpha’s Facebook report.

Wolfram Alpha

32. LikeAlyzer

LikeAlyzer provides you with recommendations and feedback on your company’s presence on Facebook based on metrics including presence, dialogue, action and information.

likealyzer

33. Fanpage Karma

Fanpage Karma is all about competition. Compare two fan pages by entering their names or IDs and see which ones comes out on top.

fanpage karma

34. Facebook Page Barometer

Agora Pulse’s Facebook Page Barometer keeps track of how your Facebook performance stacks up against the average performance of 6,000+ pages.

agorapulse

Free Website Analysis Tools

These tools give you an overall look at many different facets of your site or marketing strategy.

35. Quicksprout

by QuickSprout is a really comprehensive website audit, social media analysis and competitor report, all in one.

Quicksprout

36. Website Grader

HubSpot’s Website Grader gives you the overall performance and “grade” of your website based on mobile factors, SEO, security, speed, and performance, plus tips on how to improve your website…

HubSpot Website Grader

37. SharedCount

Want to see how your content (or anyone else’s, for that matter) has spread across the web? For sites that don’t display social media share button numbers, just paste the web address into SharedCount. Or use the multi-URL dashboard to enter lots of different web addressed and export a quick report.

SharedCount

Free Relationship Tools

These tools focus on connecting with new people and strengthening relationships with existing connections.

38. Newsle

Got some thought leaders or industry influencers you want to keep up with? Sign into Newsle through Facebook or LinkedIn and it’ll track your Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections & email contacts and let you know when they’re in the news.

Screen Shot 2014-02-10 at 8.37.38 AM

39. Rapportive

Make your email work harder for you by installing Rapportive, a Chrome extension that helps you get to know your contacts better by showing their photo, job, company, LinkedIn profile and recent tweets.

Rapportive

40. MentionMapp

See how any Twitter user is connected to others with MentionMapp, which makes all your connections visual and simple to understand and explore.

mentionmapp

Free Miscellaneous Tools

41. Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

Is it your Internet connection, or is your site (or someone else’s that you’re desperately trying to reach) really down? Find out with this simple website. Just enter your site:

Down For Everyone

And it’ll let you know if it’s just you or if the site is, well, down for everyone.

Down For Everyone 2

Over to you

Which of your favorite tools would you add to this list?

Did you notice any new ones that might be worth trying?

I’d love to hear from you about the free tools you’ve found most helpful and how you’ve put them to good use. Feel free to add any thoughts at all in the comments below. I’m looking forward to chatting!

Image sources: Pablo, IconFinder, Death to the Stock Photo

Social Media Definitions: The Ultimate Glossary of Terms You Should Know

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For many people, posting a tweet, hashtagging an Instagram caption, and sending out an invite for a Facebook event on Facebook has become common practice. 

(In fact, if you’re highly experienced, you probably do all three at once.)

But with new social media networks and innovative software cropping up almost daily, even seasoned social media users are bound to run into a term or acronym that leaves them thinking, “WTF?”more

For those head-scratching moments, we’ve created the ultimate glossary of social media marketing terms.

Whether you’re still hung up on the difference between a mention and a reply on Twitter or you just want to brush up on your social knowledge, check out the following roundup of social media terms to keep yourself in the know. 

117 Social Media Terms Defined

A

1) AddThis – AddThis is a web-tracking technology company that offers a wide range of social media and content tools — from responsive sharing buttons to custom follow buttons to recommended content plugins — designed to help you increase engagement on your website and earn more followers on social media. 

2) AMA – AMA is an acronym for “ask me anything,” which originated in a popular subreddit where users will use the term to prompt questions from other users. Since its inception, the term has gone on to be used in other online social settings, such as this discussion on Inbound.org.

3) Algorithm – An algorithm is a set of formulas developed for a computer to perform a certain function. This is important in the social sphere as the algorithms sites like Facebook and Google use are critical for developing content promotion strategies.

4) Application Programming Interface (API) – An API is a documented interface that allows one software application to interact with another application. An example of this is the Twitter API.

5) Avatar – An avatar is an image or username that represents a person online, most often within forums and social networks.

B

6) Bitly – Bitly is a free URL shortening service that provides statistics for the links users share online. Bitly is popularly used to condense long URLs to make them easier to share on social networks such as Twitter.

7) Bio – A bio on social media refers to a short bit of explainer text that explains who the user is. To see some examples, check out this roundup of some of the most amusing bios on Twitter.

8) Blog – Blog is a word that was created from two words: “web log.” Blogs are usually maintained by an individual or a business with regular entries of content on a specific topic, descriptions of events, or other resources such as graphics or video. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

9) Blogger – Blogger is a free blogging platform owned by Google that allows individuals and companies to host and publish a blog typically on a subdomain. Example: yourblogname.blogspot.com

10) Blog Talk Radio – Blog Talk Radio is a free web application that allows users to host live online radio shows.

11) BoardReader – BoardReader is a free search engine that allows users to search for keywords only in posts and titles of online forums, a popular form of social networking.

12) Bookmarking – Bookmarking online follows the same idea of placing a bookmark in a physical publication — you’re simply marking something you found important, enjoyed, or want to continue reading later. The only difference online is that it’s happening through websites using one of the various bookmarking services available, such as Pocket, or right within your browser.

C

13) Canva – Canva is an easy-to-use design tool for non-designers and designers alike. The tool offers several templates that adhere to the required dimensions for sharable social images on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. 

14) Chat – Chat can refer to any kind of communication over the internet but traditionally refers to one-to-one communication through a text-based chat application, commonly referred to as instant messaging (IM) applications.

15) Circles – Circles are clusters of a user’s friends, colleagues, family, or connections on Google+. You get to choose who goes in what Circle, and when you want to share content with only these individuals, you include that specific Circle in your post’s sharing options.

16) Clickbait – Clickbait is a term to describe marketing or advertising material that employs a sensationalized headline to attract clicks. They rely heavily on the “curiosity gap” by creating just enough interest to provoke engagement. 

17) Clickthrough Rate – Clickthrough rate is a common social media metric used to represent the number of times a visitor clickthrough divided by the total number of impressions a piece of content receives. 

18) Collective Intelligence – Collective intelligence is a shared intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision-making in social networks.

19) Comment – A comment is a response that is often provided as an answer or reaction to a blog post or message on a social network. 

20) Compete – Compete is a web-based application that offers users and businesses web analytics. It also enables people to compare and contrast the statistics for different websites over time.

21) Community Manager – The community manager is responsible for building and managing the online communications for a business in an effort to grow an online community.

22) Connections – The LinkedIn equivalent of a Facebook ‘friend’ is a ‘connection.’ Because LinkedIn is a social networking site, the people you are connecting with are not necessarily people you are friends with, but rather professional contacts that you’ve met, heard speak, done business with, or know through another connection. Connections are categorized by: 1st degree, 2nd degree, and 3rd degree.

23) Conversion Rate – Conversion rate refers to a common metric tracked in social media that is the percentage of people who completed an intended action (i.e. filling out a form, following a social account, etc.).

24) Craigslist – Craigslist is a popular online commerce site in which users sell a variety of goods and services to other users. The service has been credited for causing the reduction of classified advertising in newspapers across the United States.

25) Creative Commons – Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright. It provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

26) Crowdsourcing – Crowdsourcing, similar to outsourcing, refers to the act of soliciting ideas or content from a group of people, typically in an online setting.

D

27) Delicious – Delicious is a free online bookmarking service that lets users save website addresses publicly and privately online so they can be accessed from any device connected to the internet and shared with friends.

28) Digg – Digg is a social news website that allows members to submit and vote for articles. Articles with the most votes appear on the homepage of the site and subsequently are seen by the largest portion of the site’s membership, as well as other visitors.

29) Direct Message – Direct messages — also referred to as “DMs” — are private conversations that occur on Twitter. Both parties must be following one another to send a message.

30) Disqus – Disqus is a comment system and moderation tool for your site. This service lets you add community management and social web integration to any site on any platform.

E

31) Ebook – An ebook is an electronic version of a book. However, most ebooks are not actually available in print (unless you print them). These are typically published in PDF form. For marketers, ebooks commonly serve as lead generating content — people must fill out a form to receive their ebook copy.

32) Employee Advocacy – Employee advocacy refers to the act of employees using their own social presence to increase the reach of the company and its content. 

33) Endorsement – An endorsement on LinkedIn refers to an instance in which another LinkedIn user recognizes you for one of the skills you have listed on your profile. 

34) Engagement Rate – Engagement rate is a popular social media metric used to describe the amount of interaction — likes, shares, comments — a piece of content receives.

35) Eventbrite – Eventbrite is a provider of online event management and ticketing services. Eventbrite is free if your event is free. If you sell tickets to your event, Eventbrite collects a fee per ticket.

F

36) Facebook – Facebook is a social media platform founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. The site connects people with friends, family, acquaintances, and businesses from all over the world and enables them to post, share, and engage with a variety of content such as photos and status updates. The platform currently boasts around 1.49 billion active users.

37) Fans – Fans is the term used to describe people who like your Facebook Page.

38) Favorite – Represented by the small star icon on Twitter, favoriting a tweet signals to the creator that you liked their content or post. 

39) Flash Mob – A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.

40) Flickr – Flickr is a social network for online picture sharing. The service allows users to store photos online and then share them with others through profiles, groups, sets, and other methods.

41) Forums – Also known as a message board, a forum is an online discussion site. It originated as the modern equivalent of a traditional bulletin board, and a technological evolution of the dial-up bulletin board system.

42) Follower – In a social media setting, a follower refers to a person who subscribes to your account in order to receive your updates. 

43) Follow Friday (#ff) – Follow Friday is a trend via the hashtag #ff every Friday on Twitter. Users select other usernames and tweet them with #ff in their post, meaning they recommend following those Twitter users. There is debate whether this trend is past its prime.

44) Friends – Friends is the term used on Facebook to represent the connections you make and the people you follow. These are individuals you consider to be friendly enough with you to see your Facebook profile and engage with you.

G

45) GaggleAMP – GaggleAMP is a social media marketing platform that provides businesses with the ability to leverage its employee’s online presence to increase brand awareness and expand its reach.

46) Geotag – A geotag is the directional coordinates that can be attached to a piece of content online. For example, Instagram users often use geotagging to highlight the location in which their photo was taken. 

47) GIF – GIF is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format. In social media, GIFs serve as small-scale animations and film clips. (Check out this round up of reaction GIFs used to illustrate our excitement when Facebook announced that they were supporting their functionality.)

48) Google Chrome – Google Chrome is a free web browser produced by Google that fully integrates with its online search system as well as its other applications.

49) Google Documents – Google Documents is a group of web-based office applications that includes tools for word processing, presentations, spreadsheet analysis, etc. All documents are stored and edited online and allow multiple people to collaborate on a document in real-time.

50) Google+ – Google+ is Google’s social network. It serves as a platform for users to connect with friends, family, and professionals while enabling them to share photos, send messages, and engage with content. Google uses the “+1” to serve as the equivalent to a Like on Facebook or Instagram. 

H

51) Handle – Handle is the term used to describe someone’s @username on Twitter. For example, HubSpot’s Twitter handle is @HubSpot. 

52) Header image – A header image refers to the large photo displayed at the top of your profile on Twitter. The header image is also commonly referred to as the banner image on LinkedIn or the cover image on Facebook. 

53) Hangout – A Hangout is a video service on Google+ that allows you to video chat with up to 10 Google+ users are a time. You can name these chats, watch YouTube videos during them, open a Google Doc with colleagues, and much more.

54) Hashtag – A hashtag is a tag used on a variety of social networks as a way to annotate a message. A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by a “#” (i.e. #InboundMarketing). Social networks use hashtags to categorize information and make it easily searchable for users. 

55) HTML – HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a programming language for web pages. Think of HTML as the brick-and-mortar of pages on the web. It provides content and structure while CSS supplies style. HTML has changed over the years, and it is on the cusp of its next version: HTML5.

I

56) Impressions – An impression refers to a way in which marketers and advertisers keep track of every time ad is “fetched” and counted. 

57) Inbound Marketing – Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that uses permission-based marketing techniques to get found by potential customers, convert them into leads, customers, and advocates, and analyze the process along the way. Inbound marketing leverages tactics and tools such as SEO, blogging, social media, lead generation, email marketing, lead nurturing, marketing automation, surveys, personalization, and CRM. 

58) Instagram – Instagram is a photo sharing application that lets users take photos, apply filters to their images, and share the photos instantly on the Instagram network and other social networks like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare. The app is targeted toward mobile social sharing, and has gained more than 300 million users. 

59) Instant Messaging – Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time, direct text-based communication between two or more people. More advanced instant messaging software clients also allow enhanced modes of communication, such as live voice or video calling.

K

60) Klout – Klout is a measure of social influence. The service allows users to connect various social accounts such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc., and then provides every user with his or her Klout score. The score is out of 100 — the higher the score, the more influence it estimates you have in the social world.

L

61) Like – A Like is an action that can be made by a Facebook or Instagram user. Instead of writing a comment or sharing a post, a user can click the Like button as a quick way to show approval.

62) Link Building – Link building is an aspect of search engine optimization in which website owners develop strategies to earn links to their site from other websites with the hopes of improving their search engine ranking. Blogging has emerged as a popular method of link building.

63) LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site with over 380 million members in over 200 countries and territories. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. 

64) LinkedIn Publishing – LinkedIn’s publishing platform functions as a place where members can publish long-form posts that related to their professional interests and expertise. While this capability used to be limited to LinnkedIn Influencers only, the platform was opened up to everyone in 2014.

65) LinkedIn SlideShare – LinkedIn SlideShare is an online social network for sharing presentations and documents. Users can favorite and embed presentations as well as share them on other social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

66) Listed – The act of being “listed” on Twitter refers to when a user curates a custom list of Twitter users to more easily keep tabs on their tweets. 

67) Live streaming – Live streaming is the act of delivering content over the internet in real-time. This term was popularized in social media by apps such as Meerkat and Periscope. 

68) Lurker – A lurker online is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, social network, or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates in the discussion.

M

69) Mashup – A content mashup contains multiple types of media drawn from pre-existing sources to create a new work. Digital mashups allow individuals or businesses to create new pieces of content by combining multiple online content sources.

70) Meerkat – Meerkat is an app that allows users to stream live video from their mobile devices. 

71) Meme – A meme on the internet is used to describe a thought, idea, joke, or concept that’s widely shared online. It is typically an image with text above and below it, but can also come in video and link form. A popular example is the “I Can Has Cheezburger?” cat meme that turned into an entire site of memes.

72) Mention – A mention is a Twitter term used to describe an instance in which a user includes someone else’s @username in their tweet to attribute a piece of content or start a discussion. 

N

73) Native Advertising – Native content refers to a type of online advertising in which the ad copy and format adheres to the format of a regular post on the network it’s being published on. The purpose is to make ads feel less like ads, and more like part of the conversation. 

74) News Feed – A news feed is literally a feed full of news. On Facebook, the News Feed is the homepage of users’ accounts where they can see all the latest updates from their friends. The news feed on Twitter is called Timeline.

75) Newsjacking – Newsjacking refers to the practice of capitalizing on the popularity of a news story to amplify your sales and marketing success. 

P

76) Pandora – Pandora is a social online radio station that allows users to create stations based on their favorite artists and types of music.

77) Periscope – Periscope is a social video app that allows users to broadcast live video from wherever they are. App users also have the ability to engage with others videos, browse live or recent broadcasts, and follow users to receive notifications.

78) Permalink – A permalink is an address or URL of a particular post within a blog or website that remains indefinitely unchanged.

79) Pinterest – Pinterest is a photo sharing social network that provides users with a platform for uploading, saving, and categorizing “pins” through collections called “boards.” Boards are typically organized by theme, such as: Food & Drink, Women’s Fashion, Gardening, etc. Users have the ability to “pin” and “repin” content that they like to their respective boards. 

80) Podcast – A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually audio, that are released episodically and often downloaded through an RSS feed.

81) Pocket – Pocket is an app that enables users to manage a reading list of articles they’ve saved from the internet to read later. Pocket has an open API that allows it to integrate with over 500 applications including social networks like Twitter.

82) PPC – PPC is an acronym for pay per click. Pay per click is an online advertising model in which advertisers display ads on various websites or search engines and pay when a visitor clicks through. Bid-based PPC involves an auction in which advertisers compete with other advertisers by setting the max bid — or highest amount they’re willing to pay — for each click. Each time a visitor triggers the ad spot, the auction process pans out to select which ad will be displayed. 

Q

83) Quantcast – Quantcast provides website traffic and demographics for websites. The tool is primarily used by online advertisers looking to target specific demographics.

R

84) Real-Time Search – Real-time search is the method of indexing content being published online into search engine results with virtually no delay.

85) Real-Time Marketing – Real-time marketing is a strategy that requires marketers to publish timely content as news breaks. For example, Oreo tweeted this quick-witted response to the 2013 Super Bowl blackout as it was unfolding. 

86) Recommendation – A recommendation on LinkedIn is a term used to describe a written note from another LinkedIn member that aims to reinforce the user’s professional credibility or expertise. 

87) Reddit – Reddit is a social news site that contains specific, topic-oriented communities of users who share and comment on stories.

88) Reply – A reply is a Twitter action that allows a user to respond to a tweet through a separate tweet that begins with the other user’s @username. This differs from a mention, because tweets that start with an @username only appears in the timelines of users who follow both parties. 

89) Retargeting – Retargeting is an online marketing and advertising technique that allows marketers to display ads to people who have visited their website or are part of their contacts database. For more on how a retargeting campaign works, check out this beginner’s guide.

90) Retweet – A retweet is when someone on Twitter sees your message and decides to re-share it with his or her followers. A retweet button allows them to quickly resend the message with attribution to the original sharer’s name.

91) RSS Feed – RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blogs and videos in a standardized format. Content publishers can syndicate a feed, which allows users to subscribe to the content and read it when they please from a location other than the website (such as Feedly or other RSS readers).

92) RSS Reader – An RSS reader allows users to aggregate articles from multiple websites into one place using RSS feeds. The purpose of these aggregators is to allow for a faster and more efficient information consumption. 

S

93) Search Engine Optimization – Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of unpaid traffic to a website from search engines.

94) Selfie – A selfie is a self-portrait that is typically taken using the reverse camera screen on a smartphone or by using a selfie stick (a pole that attaches to your camera). Selfies are commonly shared on social media networks like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook using the hashtag #selfie. 

95) Skype – Skype is a free program that allows for text, audio, and video chats between users. Additionally, users can purchase plans to place phone calls through their Skype account.

96) Snapchat – Snapchat is a social app that allows users to send and receive time-sensitive photos and videos known as “snaps,” which are hidden from the recipients once the time limit expires (images and videos still remain on the Snapchat server). Users can add text and drawings to their snaps and control the list of recipients in which they send them to. 

97) Snapchat Story – A Snapchat story is a string of Snapchats that lasts for 24 hours. Users can create stories to be shared with all Snapchatters or just a customized group of recipients. 

98) Social Inbox – Social Inbox is an app in the HubSpot software that plugs into your contacts database and allows users to optimize their social monitoring, publishing, and analysis.

99) Social Media Monitoring – Social media monitoring is a process of monitoring and responding to mentions related to a business that occur in social media.

100) Social Proof – Social proof refers to a psychological phenomenon in which people seek direction from those around them to determine how they are supposed to act or think in a given situation. In social media, social proof can be identified by the number of interactions a piece of content receives or the number of followers you have. The thought is that if others are sharing something or following someone, it must be good. 

101) Social Selling – Social selling is a sales concept in which representatives leverage the power of social communication to engage with prospects by answering their questions, providing helpful content, clarifying information, etc. 

102) StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon is a free web-browser extension that acts as an intelligent browsing tool for discovering and sharing web sites.

T

103) Tag – Tagging is a social media functionality commonly used on Facebook and Instagram that allows users to create a link back to the profile of the person shown in the picture or targeted by the update. 

104) Trending Topic – Trending topics refer to the most talked about topics and hashtags on a social media network. These commonly appear on networks like Twitter and Facebook and serve as clickable links in which users can either click through to join the conversation or simply browse the related content. 

105) Troll – A troll or internet troll refers to a person who is known for creating controversy in an online setting. They typically hang out in forums, comment sections, and chat rooms with the intent of disrupting the conversation on a piece of content by providing commentary that aims to evoke a reaction. 

106) Tumblr – Tumblr is a microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, video, audio, links, and quotes to their blog. Users can also follow other blogs and repost other users’ content to their own blog.

107) Twitter – Twitter is a real-time social network that allows users to share 140-character updates with their following. Users can favorite and retweet the posts of other users, as well as engage in conversations using @ mentions, replies, and hashtags for categorizing their content. 

108) Tweepi – Tweepi is a social media management tool that provides users with a platform for simplifying the way they manage their social following. It’s typically used for mass following or unfollowing a group of people based on certain criteria. 

109) Tweetdeck – Tweetdeck is a Twitter tool that provides users with a way to manage their Twitter presence through custom columns. The platform integrates with the Twitter API to allow users to both send and receive tweets.

110) Twitterverse – Also referred to as the Twittersphere, Twitterverse is a nickname for the community of users who are active on Twitter. 

U

111) User-Generated Content – User-generated content is content — blogs, videos, photos, quotes, etc. — that is created by consumers. Marketers typically tap into their audience in an online setting to collect this type of content to support a campaign or initiative. 

V

112) Vine – Founded in 2012, Vine is a social video sharing service in which users create and engagement with short-form, six-second video clips. Videos published through the service are easily shared across other social platforms such a Twitter and Facebook.

113) Viral – Viral is a term used to describe an instance in which a piece of content — YouTube video, blog article, photo, etc. — achieves noteworthy awareness. Viral distribution relies heavily on word of mouth and the frequent sharing of one particular piece of content all over the internet.

114) Vlogging – Vlogging or a vlog is a piece of content that employs video to tell a story or report on information. Vlogs are common on video sharing networks like YouTube. 

W

115) Webinar – A webinar is an online seminar or presentation that is hosted by an individual or a company. Most often, the host requires attendees to fill out a form before granting them access to stream the audio and slides. In marketing, webinars are held to educate audiences about a particular topic while opening up the floor for a discussion to occur on social media using the webinar’s unique hashtag. 

Y

116) Yammer – Yammer is an private social network for companies which is often described as “Facebook for business.” It is intended to be used by organizations for internal communication purposes. 

Z

117) Zapier – Zapier is a software that leverages “zaps” to connect apps and provides users with a way to automate tasks. Zaps are automations that contain both Triggers and Actions. For example, you can connect your Twitter with your Evernote to save your favorited tweets to a folder, or connect Facebook and Twitter to tweet posts from a Facebook Page

Forty Two Free Marketing Resources

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Some websites and resources that we found helpful

What tools do you use to get your online marketing work done?

Can you do all the same work of a digital marketer, and do it for free?

The list of tools you use—often referred to as a marketing stack—probably covers a variety of different uses and needs, everything from social media marketing to content to email and lots more.

Is it possible to have all these great tools without paying a cent?

It was a fun challenge to come up with a way to build a $0 marketing stack, to find free alternatives to popular paid tools and services. I’m grateful for all the amazing companies out there that offer such value for so little. Here’s the list I came up with for free alternatives to paid tools. I’d love to know what you think!

What’s in the stack?

The $0 Marketing Stack: Free Alternatives to Paid Tools

For a quick overview, here are the tools I found that seemed to be great, free options for some popular paid services.

  1. Buffer
  2. Canva
  3. Google Analytics
  4. Hotjar
  5. Simply Measured
  6. Open Site Explorer
  7. Charlie
  8. HubSpot Email Marketing and HubSpot CRM
  9. WordPress
  10. Crowdfire
  11. Medium
  12. Wistia
  13. SumoMe
  14. Segment
  15. Peek
  16. Google Scholar
  17. Google Trends
  18. Blog Topic Generator
  19. Content Idea Generator
  20. Readability
  21. Hemingway
  22. Onpage Optimization Tool
  23. After the Deadline
  24. Readability Test Tool
  25. Save Publishing
  26. Followerwonk
  27. Latest.is
  28. Tweriod
  29. Must Be Present
  30. Conversation Score
  31. Wolfram Alpha Facebook report
  32. LikeAlyzer
  33. Fanpage Karma
  34. Facebook Page Barometer
  35. Quicksprout
  36. Website Grader
  37. SharedCount
  38. Newsle
  39. Rapportive
  40. MentionMapp
  41. Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

1. Social Media Scheduling: Buffer

buffer

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Sprout Social, MeetEdgar

Perhaps our best time-saving tip for social media marketing is scheduling posts ahead of time for your social profiles. You can batch the social media marketing process: Do all your curating and composing all in one go, then spread those updates out across the next day or week.

How we use Buffer: The forever free plan at Buffer lets you connect a profile from each network (one from Facebook, one from Twitter, etc.) and to schedule ahead 10 posts for each network. If you share three posts per day, that means you can stay three days ahead all the time.

We’ve found a lot of value in the hand-picked content suggestions (thanks to Courtney who finds all that great content!), which are easy to read then add.

Also free:

  • Planly (free for 1 user and 2 social channels)

2. Design: Canva

Canva

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Photoshop, InDesign

Over 2 million people trust Canva to help with creating images for social media, blog posts, and practically any other use you can imagine.

How we use Canva: The optimized sizes and built-in templates make it fast and easy to create tall pictures for Pinterest, rectangular ones for Twitter, square for Facebook or Instagram, and any size in between. We find Pablo (another free alternative) to be great for Twitter-sized images of 1,024 pixels by 512 pixels, and Canva to work really well for all else.

Also free:

3. Real-time Analytics: Google Analytics

Google Analytics real time stats

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Chartbeat

Google Analytics does pretty much everything in terms of tracking the traffic to your website. It’s a huge, monstrous amount of info, generously given away for free.

How we use Google Analytics: As a social media marketing team, we appreciate the ease with which we can see traffic from the different networks (Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals). We can check the engaged reading time by looking at Time on Page. And for the real-time stats of who’s on our site right now, we can simply click on Real-Time > Overview.

Also free:

  • Go Squared (free for the first 100 visitors and 1,000 data points)
  • MixPanel (free for 25,000 events per month)

4. Website optimization: Hotjar

Hotjar analytics

Great, paid options if you can swing it: KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg

Let’s say you’re curious how your visitors are actually using your website—where they click, how far they scroll, etc. Tools like Hotjar can show you exactly what your visitors are doing, via heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and visitor recordings. Hotjar also has options to analyze your funnel and to insert messages and surveys to your visitors.

How we use Hotjar: User research can be incredibly powerful stuff. I find great value in seeing how someone interacts with blog posts. How much of the post do they read? Where do they pause? What do they click? Seeing all this information helps me design my posts in a clearer way.

Also free:

5. Reports: Simply Measured

twitter followers report

Great, paid option if you can swing it: SumAll Reports

Simply Measured offers enterprise-level analytics and management for big brands and their social efforts. It has a wide array of free tools for the rest of us, too.

Among Simply Measured’s reports are these:

  1. Twitter Follower Report
  2. Twitter Customer Service Analysis
  3. Facebook Fan Page Report
  4. Facebook Content Analysis
  5. Facebook Competitive Analysis
  6. Facebook Insights Report
  7. Instagram User Report
  8. Social Traffic Report
  9. Traffic Source Report
  10. Google+ Page Report
  11. Vine Analysis

Phew! That’s a lot of reports!

How to use Simply Measured: Each of these reports costs no money, although Simply Measured will ask for a Twitter follow or a Facebook mention in exchange for the free report. You can save loads of time in pulling reports from this one location as you seek to gain insight on where your social media efforts have been going lately. They’ve got all six major social networks covered: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Also free:

6. SEO: Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Moz Pro

is a great free tool for checking your domain and page authority and also for checking how many links you are getting and from which source. You can also check your competition. But the free version only gives you 3 reports per day. Signing up offers unlimited reporting on all your links, keywords and competitors.

How to use Open Site Explorer: Plug your blog’s URL into Open Site Explorer to see the high-level stats like page authority and incoming links. You can also click over to the Just-Discovered tab to see recent links and Top Pages to see which pages on your site get the most links.

Also free:

7. CRM: Charlie

Charlie app

Great, paid option if you can swing it: SalesForce

A lot of the best CRM tools (Customer Relationship Management) help you stay abreast of your current and future customers. Think of a futuristic address book. The best ones are loaded with features and information. Charlie is a bit of a quick-and-easy hack to get to know a person really well.

How to use Charlie: Intended as a tool to help you prep for meeting new people, Charlie gives you a full run-down of a person—social media profiles, biography, interests, big news, etc.—by looking at your upcoming calendar or running an email address. If you’re wanting info on a single person ad-hoc, simply enter their email address into Charlie, and they’ll tell you everything.

Also free:

8. Lead generation and pop up tool: HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot CRM

HubSpot Marketing Free

HupSpot Marketing Free allows marketers to easily generate email leads from their website with a free pop up tool.

How to use HubSpot Marketing Free: You can gain a lot of great information about your leads from HubSpot Marketing Free. This pop up tool quickly gathers email addresses from your website and provides key data points like employer and which pages your leads have visited. And if you’re wondering which pages are converting at higher rates than others, it can help with that, too.

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Cirrus Insight

Also free:

9. Landing Pages: WordPress

WordPress pages

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Unbounce, LeadPages

For those who are running their website or blog via WordPress, perhaps the fastest and easiest way to set up a landing page is simply to create a new page. If you blog with WordPress, the blog content you create falls into Posts. The static content for landing pages—“Download our ebook,” “Sign up for our webinar,” etc.—can be made quite easily via Pages.

How to use WordPress: Build a new landing page in WordPress, and use this as the focal point of your social media ad campaign or your social media updates. Certain plugins like WooDojo even let you hide the content in your sidebar for particular pages, which could be a great option for minimizing the look of your page.

Also free:

  • Unbounce free plan (includes Unbounce branding)

10. Twitter management: Crowdfire

Crowdfire

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Crowdfire premium

Twitter has been so generous to open up its app to developers to make some really great tools. Sure, you can manage your Twitter profile directly via Twitter (an always free option), or you can try out tools like Just Unfollow, which allows for bulk sorting and filtering of your followers, along with insights into the demographics of the people in your audience.

How to use Just Unfollow: One way that many experts recommend to keep your Twitter following count in line with your Twitter follower count is to routinely check to see which accounts are following you back and to remove the ones that aren’t. With Just Unfollow, you can do this quickly and easily all from one page—and even whitelist the unfollowers whom you’d like to keep following.

Also free:

11. Blogging: Medium

Medium

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Ghost

It feels a bit funny to list Medium as a tool (it’s really more of a network or social media site), but when it comes to starting a new blog as cheaply and quickly as possible, Medium can’t be beat.

How to use Medium: Many young startups kick off their blog at Medium, where they enjoy a built-in audience from the start and have networking tools to help their content spread. Plus, one of Medium’s newest features is an email newsletter where you can automatically get in touch with people who follow you by sharing your latest articles.

Also free:

12. Video: Wistia

wistia

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Wistia Pro, Vimeo Pro

Once you’ve created an amazing video to share on social media or your website, where will you put it? The default seems to be YouTube, which is quick and easy but comes with less control and potentially some unrelated ads or suggestions. Wistia is made for marketers’ videos because the player keeps people on your page—or sends them precisely where you want them to go next.

How to use Wistia: After you’ve uploaded your video, you can hop into the settings and add things like call-to-action buttons or email capture formsat the end of the video. Wistia also makes it easy to view heatmaps and viewing trends of your videos, like how far most people get through your video, when they pause or click, etc.

Also free:

13. Share buttons: SumoMe Share

SumoMe

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Easy Social Share Buttons

The ubiquitous share buttons you see along the side of blog posts, many of them come from SumoMe. The any-website buttons (you don’t have to run a WordPress blog to use them) are part of the SumoMe suite of website products. If you’re okay with some SumoMe branding, you can add the buttons for free to any page and customize the networks that appear by default.

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How to use SumoMe Share: SumoMe gives you a lot of control over the appearance of the share buttons, both in which buttons are displayed and where on the page they’ll sit. One of the great features also is that they look good on mobile devices, so you maintain a great way to encourage sharing no matter where your audience is reading.

Also free:

14. Analytics: Segment

segment

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Usability Tools

I’ve heard Segment described as the one and only interface you’ll ever need for all your third-party apps. And I sure do see it recommended a lot. From what I can gather, Segment makes it easy for anyone—engineer or not—to connect new software to your website; once the Segment snippet is added, you can connect other apps like MailChimp, Google Analytics, etc. just by clicking around in your Segment dashboard. Segment handles all the visitor data for you.

How to use Segment: Rob Sobers put together a really handy guide to how he’s set up Segment for his SaaS business.

15. Testing: Peek

Peek by usertesting

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Optimizely, User Testing

When it comes to understanding how people are using your website—A/B testing, user testing, that sort of thing—there are some really fantastic paid options that can give you lots of insights. There’s also Peek, a free tool from User Testing that lets you see and hear a five-minute video of a real person using your website.

How to use Peek: For first-time insights, you may wish to have a person go  through your website or blog from the home page. Later on, you might ask for someone to test out a certain flow through your website by starting someone on a landing page. The tests take about 2-3 days to complete, and you can run three Peek tests every month.

Also free:

Even More Free Marketing Tools!

We went hunting for even more top free marketing tools in a variety of marketing categories. These tools – all quick hits you can get started with easily – focus on everything from research and writing to benchmarking and analyzing. Here’s hoping you find the perfect shortcut for your work!

Free Marketing Research Tools

We’ll start at the beginning: researching topics, sites and ideas.

16. Google Scholar

I don’t know why more people don’t talk about Google Scholar, but I love this tool for researching science-heavy articles and digging into emerging studies. It limits your search to articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Pair it with a Google Alert to get amazing research on your topics of interest delivered right to your inbox.

Google Scholar

See what the world is searching for and how interest in concepts has changed over time with Google Trends. For example, I feel like I’m suddenly hearing about “growth hacker” and “growth hacking.” Are you, too? I input those terms into Google Trends and it looks like there is a sudden new interest in the concept.

Google Trends

18. Blog Topic Generator

Stumped for ideas? Give HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator a few nouns that describe your content areas and it’ll spit out a week’s worth of post ideas.

Blog Topic Generator

19. Content Idea Generator

Enter a keyword for a fun, irreverent suggestion from Portent’s Content Idea Generator.

Title Generator

Free Reading and Writing Tools

These tools offer help with readability, keyword density and spelling and grammar.

20. Readability

Drag the Readability bookmarklet to your toolbar to convert any content on the web into a simple, easy-to-read format with an estimate of how long it’ll take you. Also check out the other bookmarklet options here, including one that sends longer content to your Kindle to read later.

Readability format

21. Hemingway

Simple, clear writing – we all strive for it. Get a little help with Hemingway. Paste a passage into the app and you’ll get an analysis that  highlights overly dense passages, unnecessary adverbs and more.

Hemingway app

22. Onpage Optimization Tool

This free onpage optimization tool from Internet Marketing Ninjas is a one-stop look at what’s going on a specific page of your site. Toss in a URL and see stats on keyword density, internal and external links and more.

Onpage Optimization

23. After the Deadline

A Chrome extension, After the Deadline checks spelling, style, and grammar wherever you go on the web.

After the Deadline

24. Readability Test Tool

Enter a web address or a block of text into the Readability Test Tool for an easy-to-understand analysis of your content. This tools measures a ton of different readability scores, and does a good job of explaining each one.

Readability Test Tool

Free Twitter Marketing Tools

These tools help you maximize your Twitter presence, from timing to sharing to analysis.

25. Save Publishing

Instantly find passages under 140 characters with Save Publishing, a handy bookmarklet that highlights tweetable passages on your screen. Post to Twitter with one click (or Buffer simply by highlighting a passage and clicking the Buffer extension)

Save Publishing

26. Followerwonk

We hope you’ve already heard of Followerwonk, one of Buffer’s many partners in amazing social media data. In addition to offering lots of super useful data about timing on Twitter, Followerwonk also has some other neat Twitter features, like the ability to compare followers of different accounts like so.

Followerwonk

27. Latest.is

It’s not breaking news. It’s not nonsense hashtags. Latest.is is an automatically generated list of interesting links on Twitter, surfaced through an algorithm that focuses on “the people that always tweet the best links – first” (no, it doesn’t tell you who they are).

Latest.is

28. Tweriod

Tweriod analyzes your account to show you the best times to tweet for more exposure and replies. Bonus: Once you get your peak times, you can sync your Buffer account with them!

Tweriod

29. Must Be Present

A free tool from Sprout Social, Must Be Present calculates how often and how quickly you respond to comments and questions on Twitter (in exchange for your email address and a bit of other info).

Must Be Present

Free Facebook Marketing Tools

These tools analyze one or more Facebook pages to deliver an analysis or report on your activities – particularly important as Facebook is always changing.

30. Conversation Score

Discover any Facebook Page’s influence, engagement and performance with Conversation Score.

cscore

31. Wolfram Alpha Facebook report

To analyze your own Facebook account and get lots of interesting data about your connection, the language you use, the times of day you post and more, try Wolfram Alpha’s Facebook report.

Wolfram Alpha

32. LikeAlyzer

LikeAlyzer provides you with recommendations and feedback on your company’s presence on Facebook based on metrics including presence, dialogue, action and information.

likealyzer

33. Fanpage Karma

Fanpage Karma is all about competition. Compare two fan pages by entering their names or IDs and see which ones comes out on top.

fanpage karma

34. Facebook Page Barometer

Agora Pulse’s Facebook Page Barometer keeps track of how your Facebook performance stacks up against the average performance of 6,000+ pages.

agorapulse

Free Website Analysis Tools

These tools give you an overall look at many different facets of your site or marketing strategy.

35. Quicksprout

by QuickSprout is a really comprehensive website audit, social media analysis and competitor report, all in one.

Quicksprout

36. Website Grader

HubSpot’s Website Grader gives you the overall performance and “grade” of your website based on mobile factors, SEO, security, speed, and performance, plus tips on how to improve your website…

HubSpot Website Grader

37. SharedCount

Want to see how your content (or anyone else’s, for that matter) has spread across the web? For sites that don’t display social media share button numbers, just paste the web address into SharedCount. Or use the multi-URL dashboard to enter lots of different web addressed and export a quick report.

SharedCount

Free Relationship Tools

These tools focus on connecting with new people and strengthening relationships with existing connections.

38. Newsle

Got some thought leaders or industry influencers you want to keep up with? Sign into Newsle through Facebook or LinkedIn and it’ll track your Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections & email contacts and let you know when they’re in the news.

Screen Shot 2014-02-10 at 8.37.38 AM

39. Rapportive

Make your email work harder for you by installing Rapportive, a Chrome extension that helps you get to know your contacts better by showing their photo, job, company, LinkedIn profile and recent tweets.

Rapportive

40. MentionMapp

See how any Twitter user is connected to others with MentionMapp, which makes all your connections visual and simple to understand and explore.

mentionmapp

Free Miscellaneous Tools

41. Down For Everyone Or Just Me?

Is it your Internet connection, or is your site (or someone else’s that you’re desperately trying to reach) really down? Find out with this simple website. Just enter your site:

Down For Everyone

And it’ll let you know if it’s just you or if the site is, well, down for everyone.

Down For Everyone 2

Over to you

Which of your favorite tools would you add to this list?

Did you notice any new ones that might be worth trying?

I’d love to hear from you about the free tools you’ve found most helpful and how you’ve put them to good use. Feel free to add any thoughts at all in the comments below. I’m looking forward to chatting!

Image sources: Pablo, IconFinder, Death to the Stock Photo