What's in your Marketing toolkit?

Managing your digital marketing efforts can be a bit difficult at times, especially when it comes to social media. There are so many outlets and it's hard to keep track of what your posting to which one. Organization is key to stay on top of your social media marketing.

Thankfully, I am not the only person out there who feels this way because there are lots of little tricks around that help to make the job easier. Thanks to a wonderful program called Hootsuite (compare to Sprout Social or Buffer) you canmanage multiple social media accounts on one dashboard. It allows you to schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ in advance and monitor all feeds right from Hootsuite. The program even offers analytics and click through reports that can be customized to measure whatever you want.

Another really great tool to consider is a reader. I used Google Reader before it was discontinued and still find that to be the best reader out there. However, since that's no longer an option I now use a tool called Bloglines. This site allows you to create folders for each topic you'd like to read up on, and drag and drop different RSS feeds into each folder. So if your company specializes in healthcare some of the folders you would include would be Health and Wellness, Affordable Care Act, etc. This way you can have all your news sources organized in one place, and when you need content to post to social media it's right at your fingertips.

The greatest help (and probably the simplest tool) to keep you organized for social media is a calendar. Use your google calendar, outlook calendar, or even an actual calendar at your desk to create what I call Weekly Breakdowns. The breakdown includes a list of what is going on locally and nationally during that specific week along with a list of the posts that will be going out for that week. This can be shared with coworkers and kept as a file to see what types of posts you have done or not.

There are plenty more tools and tricks to managing your company's social media marketing efforts, but with these three programs in your toolkit you'll be off to a great start.