If  your business has a Facebook Fan Page, you want to create interesting and compelling content to keep your Fan community active and participating on your wall. Polls are a great way to engage your Fan base community for fun, feedback or to gain insight into your brand, product or service or customer mindset. Although there are many poll application options for Facebook, we like the one simply called, Poll. Popular brands that use Poll include:

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While on the hunt for meaningful metrics tools, Erwin Hendriks, creator of Social Website Analyzer, brought his insightful resource to my attention.

Simply put, Social Website Analyzer is a one-click snapshot of the state of your website’s or brand’s social media presence across the top 20 social media sites.

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The client wants to know if their social media campaign is working! They want to understand how social media marketing will meet their goals before they commit to a budget allocation for a “mythical campaign”.  Social media marketing companies like other marketing agencies need to back their claims with statistics and provide metrics to prove effectiveness.

Granted, it is a relatively new game with the rules of engagement (sorry couldn’t resist it) still evolving, but there is a sizable number of reliable tools in form of plugins and apps that can be used in combination to measure different features of social media channels. There is no magic pill with one-tool-measure-all functionality yet and measurement is not esoteric like it would be, for say a PPC campaign, but social media experts can assemble a more or less effective group of measurement tools that best fits the business goals.
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It’s not likely that you are going to lose your online data anytime soon, though it is always a present possibility. Your real threats to your online social media accounts are hackers, viruses, user error, disgruntled employees and legal issues. You risk your access being shut off—without warning—if a service suspects you of violating its terms of service. At this very moment, many hackers are targeting online accounts simply because they are easier to access than your computer. On top of that, roughly one third of all data loss is due to user error. Backing up your social media accounts can minimize this risk.

Below are some useful apps and services, mostly free or with low subscription fees, for backing up your social media accounts and more.
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Whether you are a business with brick and mortar stores or a company without borders, you should be tapping into the growing number of local audiences seeking products and services in their own locality. You can increase business exposure and your web and store traffic simply by including geographical information to your digital content. Geotagging and local search optimization are two technology-based solutions that savvy marketers are using to attract the crucial local market segment.
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Being prolific in social media, I am always on the prowl for useful tools, resources and social media platforms to expedite the time involved in producing and sharing relevant content across the social universe. I’ve recently discovered Amplify.com. Amplify is, in my opinion, one of the most useful, powerful yet simple to use free resources available.

A hybrid between Twitter and a blog, Amplify allows you to easily highlight or clip content (up to 1000 characters of text and images &  video) you find relevant, add in your own opinion if you wish, then amplify it to your friends and followers across the internet! Amplify is especially convenient for those who wish to further their cause or share their passion, yet have little time to consistently produce original content.

To Clip or Not to Clip:
Viewers always have the option of clicking through to the original post to read the entire article.  And if you simply cannot choose highlights from the post and want to share the entire article, Amplify gives you the option to “amplify” an entire URL.

A Unique Social Community
Amplify is also a social media platform.  Just sign in with Twitter or Facebook and begin to share content.  Like most social media platforms, you can create a profile, follow sources, view your newsfeed from those sources, recommend clips, comment and share.

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Tools for an Engaged Social Presence

I am always interested in finding the best and latest tools to enhance and expedite the  social media experiences, maintenance and growth for Harp and for our clients.

Following is an abbreviated list of useful tools, resources and/or apps with links and short descriptions that you may want to incorporate into your daily social media practice. Though we obviously don’t use all of these, I have used a good many of them for different reasons.

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