Got Good Social Media Marketing Apps? [Ian Cleary of Razor Social Interview]

Neal Schaffer: 0:00

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged practical advice on how to leverage social media for your business. Now the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book, maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Hey, this is Neal Schaffer. Welcome to another episode of social business unplugged. And as what I enjoy doing for this podcast, I like bringing the podcast to wherever I go in the world. Today I'm in San Diego, California, where I'm presenting at social media examiners, Social Media Marketing World and here just as we meet many people on social media and we finally have the chance to meet them in real life. I have the opportunity coming in from Ireland, Mr. Ian clearly have razor social twitter handle E and clearly ANC Lea ry WWW dot razor social.com. And Ian also blogs for Social Media Examiner and he is really specializing in social media tools and applications. So I thought this would just be a great time to sort of pick his brain for his favorite tools and apps. Maybe there's one or two that you may not have known him. So Ian, first of all, thank you for becoming a part of this podcast.

Ian Cleary: 1:07

It's an honor to be here. And it's great. Great to have this chat. So yes, from that accent,

Neal Schaffer: 1:11

you know, he is from Ireland. I wasn't kidding. So yeah, I guess first of all, how would you from a social media marketer perspective, you have social media monitoring apps, you have dashboards, there's probably a few different categories of apps. How would you define the different categories of apps that social media marketers can use?

Ian Cleary: 1:25

Interesting? Well, I suppose the a lot of it puts in is in the management section. So pure management tools for managing social media. And then like you say, there's the monitoring site for monitoring activity related to social media, and so on, as we talked about, then some automation tools for automating some tasks within social media could be within management or outside of management. They're useful tools as well. It's there to be the main ones we've really

Neal Schaffer: 1:48

cover. So managing monitoring automation. So let's first talk about management. And I'm assuming when you mean management, you mean social media dashboards, like HootSuite or what have you. So tell me and you we all have our personal choices. From your perspective, tell us a few platforms that you would recommend if someone is maybe using Hootsuite but doesn't know about another one that may be equivalent or even better?

Ian Cleary: 2:09

Okay, well, I use Hootsuite because it is one of the best ones available. And that can be free as well. But I also use nimble as a social relationship management tool. And there's a free version and a paid version of nimble. And what that allows me to do is identify the key influencers, within nimble then I tracked the relationships within that and attracts all the social activity. So it's a great tool if you want to build a relationships with the influencers. And you were on that list, Neil, by the way,

Neal Schaffer: 2:35

oh, well, thank you very much. I don't know why. But let me ask you. So just we're going to talk about tools here. I am someone who went from twitter.com to Tweet Deck to Hootsuite then to Sprout Social, okay, not enough. You've used Sprout Social, but you also have the ability to track your communication, as if it's a CRM with people that you've tweeted with. Would you say that combination of HootSuite and nimble is equivalent to that? Are there special features that you recommend within nimble that the Sprout Social to the world can't handle?

Ian Cleary: 3:04

Yeah, well, what I like about nimble is as well as the ability to track people within you know, all the social network activity, you can also progress that to the lead status and into a sales status. So it's a pure CRM tool as well. So the prospect social, more or less focus more on the social side of it. Whereas nimble is looking for the answer and relationship from when your initial introduction to actually where you bring that get the sale. So that's very useful. Within the Nimble side of

Neal Schaffer: 3:30

things. Did you hear that that is just amazing advice. Basically, picking the people that you want to engage with in social whether you're trying to develop new business or new partnerships. So you want to engage the quote unquote, influencers, and really using nimble as a CRM like a Salesforce to really put down your targets your you know, where they are in the pipeline. That sounds awesome. Okay, so let's move on to the monitoring. And I know you can monitor just by building a column and HootSuite as well. But let's hear what you like in terms of monitoring tools.

Ian Cleary: 3:54

Yeah, so I do use Hootsuite on I have a separate column with keywords, so I can monitor keywords. But one of my favorite apps that I've come across recently is mentioned. It's mentioned dot national, what I like about mentioned is well, there's a free version. Again, we like the free versions, and the paid version is 19 $19.99. Very cheap and very good monitoring. Now, it's like Google Alerts on steroids. If I track my name, or my business name, it's tracking across Twitter, Facebook, the web or blogs, so you're getting it everywhere. So somebody within a business page mentions my company name, I get a notification to monitor not nationally, and then I can respond within their Facebook business page. And it also has a mobile version of the app, which I love as well so you can get the alerts on your mobile phone. So that was really, really good from the monitoring side.

Neal Schaffer: 4:44

So would you say that sort of a combination of Google Alerts plus Social Mention gives you the ability to search like salsa mentioned with the ability of getting automated notifications that Google Alerts or is this just way better than any of those? Is it like one plus one equals three?

Ian Cleary: 4:56

Yeah, I mentioned is trial comm Google Alerts. So you don't need it. And he just used mentioned as your monitoring app.

Neal Schaffer: 5:02

And compared to social mentioned, it's it's much more robust.

Ian Cleary: 5:05

It's much more robust, much more comprehensive. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. So

Neal Schaffer: 5:08

let's now move to the third type of tool wrap, which is the automation. And obviously, there's certain probably things you can automate within the tools you just share. But are there any specific automation types of tools that you recommend?

Ian Cleary: 5:18

Well, there's a few we would use, for example, where you post out a blog post, we use deliberate DLP or that it automatically pick up that blog post and send it out on to Twitter or on Facebook or to LinkedIn. That's what we use free part of that, which, which is brilliant. We also use sometimes IFTT. If This Then That. That's a useful tool for automating, you know, task a task B, and that's pretty good. And Zapier is that API er is another version like IFT T, and that's quite useful. So that that'd be the main automation tools. Buffer we would use which you need to categorize an interest isn't that level of automation. So you can schedule a lot of blog posts or content to go out at certain times that you've specified already. And that's very useful because it saves so much time.

Neal Schaffer: 6:06

Just a real specific question this the first time I've ever heard about Zapier, so compared to IFTT, what's the difference with Zapier? What are the advantages of using Zapier over I have TGT

Ian Cleary: 6:16

they have a different set of rules that you can apply. So there's some of the functionality is quite similar, and others is new functionality that's not provided, but I have TT. Another advantage to Zapier is that if the automation is not available, you can build that automation so you can further develop Zapier yourself. So as a business organization, you can basically do an awful lot more with Zapier.

Neal Schaffer: 6:38

So could you write from Zapier directly into social API's? For instance?

Ian Cleary: 6:42

Yes, you can. Yes. Wow.

Neal Schaffer: 6:43

Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Any other specific tools or apps that you recommend that we didn't talk about that you have hit your fancy over the past few weeks?

Ian Cleary: 6:51

One is Post Planner, and the other is post rocket.

Neal Schaffer: 6:56

Josh rocks. Yeah. He paid me to say that, Oh,

Ian Cleary: 7:02

well, it's very good to pick it up content for you. And having the content ready available for you to share really quickly. I think the guests, the post rocket guys are pretty sharp there. A new version is coming out in the next couple of weeks. I'm really looking forward to see what that is. And again, it's a very good Facebook tool. And they're really focused on being able to put the right content at the right time think about now when I just didn't mention is a mobile one called the LIDAR. So I think the future of social media marketing management tools will be on a mobile device so people will move to using on a mobile device glider is a really interesting application where it provides really nice templates that you can use and update and send out your these nice graphical images out onto Facebook and Pinterest and Twitter and everything very easily. And I think it's just a really great application. And I think that's where small businesses in particular will be using mobile to do their updates the graphic designer to build these templates provide all these templates to Glyder

Neal Schaffer: 7:58

I think especially for brick and mortar stores that one offer coupons what have you really easy to do that yeah,

Ian Cleary: 8:03

absolutely. You can see like all sorts of restaurants and shops and everything using these type of tools.

Neal Schaffer: 8:08

Well there you go. We just heard the latest cutting edge social media tools advice from Ian clearly you are in Dublin sir.

Ian Cleary: 8:14

I am a David's yet Dublin Ireland. Yes, if you're ever in Ireland, you definitely want to

Neal Schaffer: 8:17

check it out. Once again his Twitter is Ay ay ay N as in Nancy, C L E ar y his site is www dot razor social.com. Also make sure to check out his monthly column on social media tools on Social Media Examiner Any closing notes for the audience, you know, just

Ian Cleary: 8:32

say in terms of them, maybe don't overdo the tools, we give them section tools there, pick the ones that are most relevant to your business, and get it working for one tool properly before you start adding in additional ones.

Neal Schaffer: 8:43

Thank you very much. And it was a pleasure having you today and another episode of social business unplugged. I hope you'll share this with your friends and make E and a lot of friends out there on social media. He already has a lot but you can never have too many. Right. Alright, thanks again and make it a great day everybody. Thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast and would be honored by your ratings and comments on iTunes. Please feel free to spread the word about this podcast and if you would like to appear on this podcast or have content that you would like covered please contact Neal Schaffer Neal at windmill networking.com Also please subscribe to the windmill networking blog on social media strategy at www. Windmill networking.com Thanks again and make it a great day.