The 15 Best Browser Extensions to Improve Your Social Media Marketing

This post originally published on September 22, 2014. We’ve updated it here with new extensions, images, and a Product Hunt collection.

There are a few actions I perform over and over again as I work through my social media marketing plan. Do you know the feeling? You click on the same few buttons or type in the same URL.

And then, one day, someone shows you a browser extension that completely rocks your world for the better.

I’d love to share some of those world-rocking browser extensions with you today. There’re several great options out there to supercharge your browser and streamline the tasks you keep coming back to.

Got a favorite browser extension that you use for social media marketing? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

 

The Best Browser Extensions for Social Media

What a fun opportunity it’s been to experiment with and test drive a number of amazing social media browser extensions. There are so many great ones out there, I’ve split the post into a couple sections here:

1. 15 favorite Safari, Firefox, and Chrome extensions
2. The top picks from the Buffer community
3. Our Product Hunt collection of browser extensions

Enjoy!

15 Best Safari, Firefox, and Chrome Extensions for Social Media Marketers

1. Buffer – Quick and easy sharing to social media

The Buffer extension lets you share to your connected profiles from any website, blogpost, or page. The extension grabs the page title as well as any associated photos. Power users can even go a step further and highlight text within the article to right-click on any image and share that image directly.

The extension also comes with goodies while you’re browsing Twitter and Facebook with built-in buttons for buffering to your queues and scheduling reshares.

(Other helpful sharing extensions: Shareaholic, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social.)

Available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari

2. Giphy – Fun animated GIFs to enhance your updates

With Twitter and Pinterest now supporting GIFs and other social media sites like Google+ and Tumblr enjoying great engagement with them, it’s become increasingly handy to have a pitch-perfect GIF at the ready to express how you’re feeling in your update, reply, or comment. The Giphy extension lets you search through the huge Giphy.com archives and grab a shortened URL of the GIF you choose.

Available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari

3. Pocket / Instapaper / Evernote – Curating amazing content to share

Read-it-later extensions are a super time saver. Pocket, Instapaper, and Evernote let you save a blogpost or article to read later, and you can do so with a single button click via the extension.

Available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari

4. Instagram for Chrome – Instagram photos right in your browser

One of the best ways to manage your Instagram feed from a computer, the Instagram for Chrome extension lets you browse your feed and your friends, like and comment on photos, receive desktop notifications, and even drill down into details like filters. The experience is as close to the official Instagram app as you can get, and it’s a hugely helpful resource for brands who wish to manage their Instagram feed without reaching for the phone (or even a browser tab).

Available on Chrome

5. Bitly – Create, share, and track shortened links

Bitly’s browser extension has all the standard features you’d expect from a link shortener: custom shortening, analytics, and easy copy-and-share buttons. Bitly takes things one step further even and lets you add shortened links to bundles so you can keep organized with a series of similar links. Another cool feature: The Bitly extension can notify you when your link reaches a predetermined (by you) number of views.

Available on Chrome, Firefox

6. Riffle – Complete info on any Twitter user

This browser extension adds a whole new layer of info to your Twitter stream. Click on any Riffle icon or Twitter username, and the extension opens up a display of that user’s data, including other social accounts, Twitter statistics, most-used hashtags and categories, top mentions, top URLs, and much more.

(Also check out Rapportive and Vibe for similar functionality, including some neat inbox integrations.)

Available on Chrome

7. Window Resizer – Check your tweets, posts, and updates on any screen size

Chances are that not everyone will be viewing your social media updates on the same size screen as you. Marketing for mobile devices has brought about a lot of change! In this case, an extension like Window Resizer can be super helpful for seeing your updates from others’ perspectives. The extension comes with preset sizes that mimic iPhone, tablet, and desktops, and you can completely customize the sizes and order of the various options.

Available on Chrome

8. Ritetag – Instant analysis of the hashtags you tweet

Ritetag is one of our favorite hashtag tools, and their extension brings across their neat color-coded hashtag guide right into the Twitter editor. Ritetag provides direct feedback on the popularity and strength of the hashtags you use. Green is good, blue is poor, and red is overused.

(Bonus cool thing: The extension works within Buffer!)

Available on Chrome and Firefox

9. Social Analytics – Quick view of share stats on any page

Visit a blogpost and click the Social Analytics browser icon to see at-a-glance how many social shares the post received. Social Analytics shows Facebook likes, shares, and comments, plus Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest stats. It could be super helpful for tracking the spread of your own content or for investigating someone else’s.

Available on Chrome

10. Awesome Screenshot – Capture, annotate, and share your screen

Screenshots can be a helpful, useful visual for sharing on social media. Awesome Screenshot brings this functionality into the browser. You can take a screenshot, annotate, and download or share immediately.

Available on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari

Note: Thanks to Karmi in the comments for pointing out that Awesome Screenshot comes with a disclaimer about potential malware. You can check out an alternate screen capture extension like Clipular.

11. Feedly Mini – Save RSS feeds of any site you’re on

Part of sharing great content on social media is sourcing great content. Feedly is one of our favorite places to keep an eye on stories worth sharing, and the Feedly extension makes it easy to add new sites to your RSS lists to keep an eye on. The Feedly Mini extension adds a small icon to each page, and when you click the icon, you can add a feed directly or even share the page to your social accounts.

Available on Chrome

12. Klout – Social media influence score

Klout calculates an influence score based on your interactions and popularity across all your various social media channels. The Klout extension is the quickest, easiest way to view this score—for instance, right in the Twitter stream next to anyone’s username. Klout has also expanded into social media sharing, and the extension allows you to share easily from any website.

Available on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari

13. Pin It button – Share directly to Pinterest

Sharing to Pinterest is made infinitely easier with the Pinterest extension, which lets you Pin any image you find online to your Pinterest board. Clicking the extension opens up a window of all images that appear on the page, and you can choose which one(s) to share. Also, while browsing a page, you’ll see a Pinterest button overlay whenever you mouse over an image.

Available on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari

14. CircleCount – Instant Google+ analysis

With the CircleCount extension, you can inspect any profile or page on Google+ and see a snapshot of comments, reshares, and +1s per post as well as follower graphs. If you drill down to a specific Google+ post, the CircleCount extension lets you view ripples, add to your favorites (via the CircleCount website), and add to a shared circle.

Available on Chrome

15. Social Fixer for Facebook – A fully customized Facebook experience

This extension allows for huge amounts of customization for the way you view Facebook. Here’s a small sampling of what you can edit:

• Tabbed news feeds
• Feed filters (e.g., remove political posts)
• Hide posts you’ve already read
• Thumbnail previews

This just scratches the surface. Check out the Social Fixer homepage for even more ideas on what you can edit.

Available on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari

Top picks from the Buffer community

1. Color Picker – Identify the precise color of anything you see in your browser (also: Eye Dropper)
2. Extensity – An extension for managing your extensions (yodawg)
3. Google Drive – Quickly access all your stored files
4. Any.do – Manage your to-do list from anywhere
5. Swayy Smart Share – Share and discover engaging content
6. Goodbits – Easily add content to your next email newsletter
7. Panda – Discover huge amounts of interesting, entertaining content
8. Snip.ly – Link shortening and custom CTAs
9. Web Boost – Faster web browsing
10. Dropbox – Find and store all your files
11. Silver Bird – Custom Twitter timeline tool
12. HashPlug – Add Twitter search results to Google pages
13. tl;dr – Summarize web articles into short synopses
14. Pinterest Tab – Beautiful Pinterest image on every new tab
15. 1Password – Complete password management (also: LastPass)
16. Share As Image – Create beautiful, shareable images on any page
17. Discoverly – Social media contact info

The Browser Extension Collection on Product Hunt

I get so much joy out of hanging out on Product Hunt, exploring the cool tools and apps that people have built. One amazing feature of Product Hunt is their collections—bundles of top products under a common theme.

I put together a quick collection of some of the top browser extensions mentioned here in this post:

Over to you: Which extensions do you use?

I’ve got a few favorite ones for social media marketing (Buffer and Pocket) and a few that I rely on for a faster, more fun browsing experience (AdBlock and Dewey bookmarks). There are so many amazing ones out there. Which ones are your favorites?

Which do you use in your browser?

I’d be keen to hear what you’ve got working for you! Feel free to drop a note here in the comments.

Image sources: Markus Spiske

The post The 15 Best Browser Extensions to Improve Your Social Media Marketing appeared first on Social.

A Scientific Guide to Hashtags: How Many, Which Ones, and Where to Use Them

This post originally published on April 8, 2014. We’ve updated it here with new info, screenshots, and audio.

Have you ever found yourself explaining hashtags to someone whose only connection with the word is as a telephone button?

Internet language has evolved considerably over the past few years as social media has taken off. Hashtags are a huge part of this evolution. What once was a telephone button is now a social media phenomenon.  No wonder people are curious.

When they ask, I tell them that hashtags are a pound sign immediately followed by a keyword. They’re used for categorization on social media. Yes, they can be annoying if overused. And yes, I’ve seen the hashtag video of Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake.

Hashtags also have the potential to be truly valuable. The stats and info below make a pretty clear case that we should be understanding, using, and appreciating hashtags.

Research says you should be using hashtags

If you’re looking for a completely cut-and-dry ruling on the topic of hashtags, then here it is: You should be using hashtags.

The proliferation of hashtags is truly incredible. What began on Twitter has now spread to Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Google search, and almost everywhere in between. (LinkedIn experimented with hashtags for awhile before giving up.)

The widespread acceptance of hashtags should give you plenty of reason to consider using them. I also really enjoy the case laid out by Steve Cooper, writing for Forbes.com:

As ridiculous as hashtags might seem to marketing veterans who remember a time before Twitter and Facebook, the younger generation and potential customers/clients don’t. To them, using hashtags is as natural and common as typing their query into the search box.

Not only could people be typing in your hashtag on a Google search, but they could very well be doing it in Twitter, too. In this sense, a hashtag will make your content viewable by anyone with an interest in your hashtag, regardless of whether they’re part of your clan or not.

A hashtag immediately expands the reach of your tweet beyond just those who follow you, to reach anyone interested in that hashtag phrase or keyword.

But how do you find the right hashtags for your content and make sure you’ve got them in the right number, on the right social network? Let’s break it down.

Hashtags on Twitter

Tweets with hashtags get two times more engagement than tweets without.

This data, courtesy of Buddy Media, is one of the most-cited examples of the effectiveness of hashtags, and for good reason: doubling your online engagement is a big deal! Imagine going from four retweets to eight or 10 retweets to 20. And all it takes is a simple # or two?

Apparently so. Although, you’ll want to keep it to no more than two.

Buddy Media’s research also showed that the volume of hashtags bears monitoring: one or two hashtags appear to be the max. When you use more than two hashtags, your engagement actually drops by an average of 17 percent.

Twitter’s own research into hashtags confirms that there is significant advantage to using them. Individuals can see a 100 percent increase in engagement by using hashtags (the same bump as seen in the Buddy Media study). Brands can see a 50 percent increase.

Engagement, as measured in these studies, can include clicks, retweets, favorites, and replies, yet if it’s only retweets your after, hashtags still would be a smart bet.

Tweets with one or more hashtag are 55 percent more likely to be retweeted.

Dan Zarella discovered this effect in a study on retweeting behavior that included more than 1.2 million tweets. The large scope of the study made for a 99.9 percent confidence interval with the results.

The one caveat to hashtags on Twitter might come for those brands looking to gain clicks on Twitter ads. In the case of advertisements, Twitter found that tweets without a # or @-mention generate 23 percent more clicks.

The reason? Hashtags and @-mentions give people more places to click inside a tweet instead of focusing solely on a call-to-action.

Hashtags on Instagram

Instagram is another hotspot for hashtags, and the good news for those who love to extensively tag photos is that there doesn’t seem to be a saturation point.

Interactions are highest on Instagram posts with 11+ hashtags.

A rule of thumb could be: Don’t sweat your amount of Instagram hashtags.

The best part about this recommendation is that the data comes from a set of users with 1,000 or fewer followers—a group that likely includes small businesses and those just diving in to Instagram. In other words, hashtags could be your best bet for growing a fast following on Instagram.

Hashtags on Facebook

So yes, Twitter and Instagram are clear winners for hashtags. But what about Facebook? Here’s where the recommendation gets a little trickier.

Facebook posts without a hashtag fare better than those with a hashtag.

Hashtags have only been around on Facebook since June 2013, and three months later, research from EdgeRank Checker found that using hashtags on Facebook has zero positive effect on reach. Posts without hashtags outperform those with hashtags.

A lot could have changed since September, when this data was first released. Should you abandon hashtags on Facebook solely due to this research? It’s probably best to test. There’s still a lot of analysis left to be done. For instance, Social Bakers studied posts in February of this year and found that using hashtags might not be the main worry, but rather using too many hashtags (just like the advice on Twitter).

Hashtags on Google+

On Google+, your posts are given hashtags automatically based on their content, but you can also edit them or add your own. Also unique about Google+: You can add hashtags in your comments as well as your post – double the opportunities to be found.

And since Google+ is Google’s social network, hashtags are now built right into Google searches. If you type in a hashtag search, you’ll get the normal search results plus a sidebar of relevant Google+ posts. Hashtags have truly arrived!

Google+’s “related hashtags” also offer smart marketers a brainstorming opportunity to discover new content ideas and gauge interest level in specific topics.

Tools to find and manage your hashtags

Using the right tools, you can use hashtags as an organization system for your social media campaigns. With everything collected under one hashtag banner, you can see at-a-glance the reach of your campaign and the discussions happening around the topic.

1. Hashtagify.me

One of the most complete hashtag tools you will find, Hashtagify.me has reams of data you can use to analyze hashtags. The most helpful could very well be the first data you’re shown: related hashtags and their popularity. When you type in a hashtag, the service will show you other hashtags to consider and will display visually how popular each hashtag is and how closely it correlates to the original.

2. RiteTag

RiteTag helps ensure that the tags you use are well-chosen by showing you how good, great, or overused a particular hashtag is. The visual organization of hashtags into colored bars works great for quick analysis at-a-glance.

3. Tagboard

With Tagboard, you can see how your hashtag is used across multiple networks. The results pages on Tagboard show hashtagged posts from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Vine, and App.net

4. Twitalyzer

Though not an explicitly hashtag tool, Twitalyzer does show hashtags as part of its audit of Twitter accounts. Input the username of someone you want to investigate, and Twitalyzer can tell you what hashtags he or she uses most often. This can be really helpful in finding out how your niche’s influencers tweet.

5. Trendsmap

Local businesses might find value in Trendsmap, which shows you relevant hashtags that are being used in your geographic area. (#wrestlemania is a popular one where I am in Idaho.)

4 steps to find the right hashtag to use

Using the tools above, you can hone in on a few ideal hashtags to start with, and like most things online, test and iterate from there.

1. Learn from the best: What hashtags are influencers using?

Twitalyzer can give you a good foundation of where to begin for your hashtag search by showing you how influencers are using hashtags. Grab a handful of usernames of people and brands in your industry whom you admire, and input the accounts into Twitalyzer. At the bottom of the results page, you’ll see a section for their most commonly-used hashtags. Add the relevant ones to your list of potential hashtags.

Let’s say I wanted to find some hashtags to use in promoting social media marketing content. I might start with a list of names like Jeff Bullas, Jay Baer, Mari Smith, and Ann Handley. Here is what the hashtag results on Twitalyzer look like for Jeff Bullas:

 

Info like this would lead me to start a short list of hashtags like:

• #socialmedia
• #SMM
• #twitter
• #contentmarketing
• #social
• #content
• #marketing

2. Cover all your bases: Are there related hashtags you should be considering?

Armed with an idea list of hashtags, you can then hop into Hashtagify.me to see which related hashtags might also be worth pursuing. While you’re doing this exercise, take note of the circle size on your results: The larger the circle, the more popular the hashtag.

Again, following our social media marketing example, here is what the results page would look like for a search of #socialmedia:

Not every hashtag listed here will be relevant to you, but it does help to see some that you might not have previously considered. In the case of our example, I might add #business, #infographic, and hashtags of specific network names like #twitter and #facebook.

3. Identify the all-stars: Which hashtags are the best to use?

Popularity and volume can be good indicators of the value of your hashtag, but you may wish to go one step further. Hashtagify.me has advanced, premium tools that let you go deeper into statistics on individual hashtags. In a pinch, you can also get some solid data from RiteTag and their visual expression of how much each tag can boost your post’s reach. 

Among posts that contain the word “marketing,” RiteTag shows these tags as the most likely to be great, good, or overused. (There’s that #wrestlemania tag again!)

4. Double check: Could your chosen hashtags mean something else entirely?

One last check before you finalize your list of hashtags should be whether or not the hashtag you’ve chosen is being used elsewhere in an entirely different context.

The worst thing that can happen when using a hashtag is to realize after it’s tweeted that the same hashtag is used for an entirely different topic.

Jawbone tried a #knowyourself campaign on Instagram, only to find that the hashtag was already being used generically by thousands of users in all sorts of different contexts. This didn’t necessarily ruin Jawbone’s campaign, but it may have made life a little more difficult for the marketing team. 

Takeaways

Hopefully you’ve learned the value of hashtags here and a few neat ideas on how to find some to use in your social sharing. If you’re looking for a simple rule of thumb for hashtagging posts, I think there’s a lot of truth here in this advice from The Next Web:

Rule of thumb: 1 – 3 tags is best over all platforms.

• Twitter: to categorize
• Pinterest: to brand, and be specific (tags are only clickable in pin descriptions)
• Instagram: to build community, and be unique/detailed
• Google+: to categorize; autogenerates tags based on what it thinks your post is most relevant to
• Tumblr: to categorize interests, can be specific and general (has a “track your tags” feature)
• Facebook: sort of a hashtag fail – if your audience is very business-minded, follow Twitter rules; if it is community-oriented, follow Pinterest/Instagram rules

What hashtags do you routinely use on social media? I’d love to hear how you’ve put hashtags to work in your social media strategy.

P.S. If you liked this post, you might enjoy our Buffer Blog newsletter. Receive each new post delivered right to your inbox, plus our can’t-miss weekly email of the Internet’s best reads. Sign up here.

Image credit:mikecogh, Unsplash, IconFinder, Pablo, Quick Sprout

The post A Scientific Guide to Hashtags: How Many, Which Ones, and Where to Use Them appeared first on Social.

The Big List of Twitter Tools: 91 Free Twitter Tools and Apps to Fit Any Need

This post originally published on August 11, 2014. We’ve updated it here with the latest, newest tools and screenshots.

For those familiar with the original post, we’ve added these new tools: Brook, Warble, Twitterific, Twurly, Filta, Hash, Klear, Twitter account home, Social Bearing, Stats for Twitter, Pablo, Spruce, Twitshot, Share As Image, Tagboard, Listen to Twitter, Squall, Thunderclap, Periscope, Meerkat, Twitter Feed, Twitterfav, Click to Tweet, Bedazzle, Pullquote.

Twitter is a fascinating adventure of relationships, entertainment, education, and fun. Now imagine layering on a few dozen power-ups.

That’s how it feels sometimes when you find just the right Twitter tool. And there’s a tool for practically every desire or whim.

Tools for productivity, for efficiency, for research, and so much more. With such a generous API, Twitter tools have become legion—and we social sharers are better off for it.

At Buffer, we tend to come across a fair share of social media tools. We’ve collected a great bunch to share with you! Here are all the tools we’ve found helpful and many more that we’re excited to try. If there’s a free Twitter tool out there, you’re likely to find a mention here in our list. 

(If I missed any good free Twitter tools, let me know in the comments!)

The big list of 91 free Twitter tools for marketers

Navigate this list fast

Looking for something in particular? Try clicking one of these categories:

Analytics | Chats | Discovery | Follow/Unfollow | Hashtags | Images | Mentions & Monitoring | Scheduling | Timing | Trending Topics | Twitter Clients | Other

Twitter Tools for Analytics

1. Daily 140: Recent follows and favorites of 3 tweeps of your choosing

Find three folks on Twitter, and Daily 140 emails you once-a-day with all the new people they’ve followed and tweets they’ve favorited.

2. My Top Tweet: Your Top 10 list of tweets

Find anyone’s Top 10 tweets, ordered by engagement.

3. SocialBro: Analytics, optimization, and more

A nearly all-in-one platform for all things Twitter. The free plan comes with analytics, best time to tweet, follow/unfollow tools, and community segmentation.

4. Riffle: Data visualizations for any Twitter user

This browser plugin reveals vast insights into any Twitter user you choose. Discover statistics, popular hashtags, most shared links, connected profiles, and much more.

5. Twitonomy: Detailed analytics on users and tweets

A dashboard of analytics for whichever Twitter user you choose (even yours). Analyzes profiles, tweets, engagement, and more.

6. Klout: Twitter scores

Track your influencer score (on a scale of 1-100) and use the Klout dashboard to create and schedule new tweets.

7. SumAll: Email reports for Twitter stats

Sync your Twitter to SumAll, and start seeing daily or weekly emails on how your followers are growing, your mentions, and your engagement.

8. SocialRank: Follower analysis to find your most awesome fans

Receive a sorted list of your best followers, most influential followers, and most engaged followers. Useful to track the important people to engage with on Twitter.

9. Klear: Social media analytics & a Twitter resume

Plug in your Twitter account to see a snapshot of who you follow, which demographics you fit, who’s in your close network, and more.

10. Bluenod: Community visualization

Type in a user or hashtag and see a detailed map or visualization about the community around the user or the people using the hashtag.

11. Twitter account home: The official overview of your Twitter profile

Head to analytics.twitter.com for a detailed overview of all your activity in the past 28 days, including your top tweets, top mentions, and top followers.

12. Social Bearing: Powerful search for tweets and profiles

Search Twitter keywords, locations, usernames, interests, or followers, then use your new-found knowledge to analyze your fellow tweeps or find new ones to follow.

13. Stats for Twitter: Beautiful iOS app to analyze yours and others’s Twitter accounts

See a visual breakdown of all sorts of Twitter stats: Followers analyzed by activity and popularity, competitors shown side-by-side with your account, etc.

***

Twitter Tools for Chats

14. Beatstrap: Team liveblogging

Cover live news, sports, and events through Twitter, via hashtags, and collaborate with your team on the coverage. Completed “Beats” come with an embed code.

15. TweetChat: Twitter chat management

Log in to follow a specific hashtag, hang out in a room that collects the hashtagged tweets for you, and reply as you like (with the hashtag added automatically to your tweet).

16. Chat Salad: A calendar of Twitter chats

See upcoming Twitter chats and when they’re scheduled, as well as the hashtags they use (so you can follow along).

17. Twubs: Twitter chat homepages

Register a hashtag for your chat and collect/view the tweets from one location.

18. Nurph: Chat planning and organizing

Nurph channels let you plan and organize your chat, complete with follow-up stats and replays.

19. TwChat: Real-time chat rooms for Twitter chats

Submit your hashtag. Enter your chat room. Have fun!

***

Twitter Tools for Discovering Fresh Content and Fun Users

20. Nuzzel: Discover what your friends are reading

As described by Twitter’s Joanna Geary, “find out what’s trending among the people the people you follow follow.” Make sense? Translation: Content discovery from friends and friend of friends.

21. BuzzSumo: Find influencers, topic-by-topic

Type in a keyword to see which voices get the most shares on Twitter. Find influencers, sniff out headline ideas, and learn what works on Twitter and who’s working it.

22. Swayy: What your followers are interested in

See the content that your followers recommend plus the topics they most enjoy. View it all via the dashboard or from a daily email digest.

23. Twipho: Searchable Twitter feed of photos

Search by keyword or by location to find photos shared on Twitter.

24. Topsy: A search engine for social

The most recent and most relevant tweets (and other social updates) based on a keyword search. Also shows keyword volume, sentiment score, and other analytics.

25. Digg Deeper: The best stories from your friends

An algorithmic display of the top articles and links that your Twitter followees have shared. Pair with News.me: a daily email newsletter of what your friends share on Twitter.

26. The Latest: A museum for the day’s best Twitter links

A real-time, constantly updated list of the most interesting links on Twitter, culled from the accounts of interesting people

27. Twurly: Daily email of top Twitter links

An easy way to stay on top of the best links in your timeline. Twurly analyzes the popularity and page authority of the links so you only see the best.

28. Filta: Bio search all your followers

Curious which of your followers are into football? Use Filta to search the bios of all your followers for any keyword you want.

29. Hash: Top stories on Twitter

A visual look at the leading stories and hashtags on Twitter. Available on the web and as an iOS app.

30. Brook: Customized Twitter digests of top tweets from top tweeps

Receive a daily email of the five best tweets from the Twitter users you choose.

***

Twitter Tools for Following & Unfollowing

31. Crowdfire: Powerful follower management

Prune your list of those you follow by seeing who follows you back, who’s recently unfollowed you, and who’s inactive, plus build a whitelist of accounts you’d always like to follow no matter what.

32. ManageFlitter: Follow/unfollow in bulk

Segment your followers according to a number of factors: last tweet, follower count, location, language and whether or not they follow you back.

33. Tweepi: Tidy up who you follow

Cleanup inactive follows, flush those who don’t follow back, and reciprocate someone else’s follow—all done in bulk and with a few clicks of a checkbox.

34. Unfollowers: In-depth follow/unfollow

Get a complete breakdown of those you follow, and unfollow with ease.

35. DoesFollow: See who follows whom

Does A follow B? Does Bill Gates follow Skrillex? Does Guy Kawasaki follow Jay Baer?

36. Commun.it: Complete follower management dashboard

See all the information on all your followers – top tweets, influence, and more.

37. T.U.N.S.: Twitter Unfollow Notification Service

Receive an email every time someone unfollows you.

38. Twindr: Tindr for unfollowing people (iOS)

Swipe left to unfollow, swipe right to keep following.

39. Toolset.co: Twitter toolset for finding people to follow or unfollow

Simple tools to grow your followers. Copy the follow list of another user, find users to follow based on keyword or device.

40. Linkreaser: Grow your following by finding accounts based on keyword

Share a keyword, and Linkreaser will find tweets and influencers you might like to see and follow.

41. FollowFly: What else are Twitter users sharing?

Search Twitter users, find their best content on Twitter and beyond – Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Reddit AMAs are currently supported.

***

Twitter Tools for Hashtags

42. Rite tag: Hashtag recommender

Plug in a hashtag and see feedback on the tag’s reach and popularity as well as suggestions for some alternatives to try. Complete with pretty colors to see at-a-glance which hashtags are best.

43. Hashtagify.me: Complete analytics into any hashtag

Enter a hashtag to discover related tags, recent conversations, usage patterns, and influencers.

44. Seen: Hashtag-based curation

Collect the media that was shared with a certain hashtag, then rank the results. Share your curation with friends and followers.

45. Tagboard: Mood boards for hashtags

Enter in a hashtag and Tagboard will pull all the most recent and relevant content into a highly useful board of tweets and visuals.

***

Twitter Tools for Images

46. Pablo: Create beautiful social media images in 30 seconds

A tool we build here at Buffer, Pablo lets you quickly share a quote or build an image with beautiful backgrounds from UnSplash and the best, catchiest fonts. Customize with your logo, too.

47. Spruce: Text over image

Create an attention-getting image with Spruce’s simple and quick image-making app.

48. Twitshot: See & share the images from any web page

Give Twitshot a URL, and it will pull in all the images associated with that page, giving you an easy option to see what to share.

49. Share As Image: Highlight text, create image

Highlight text from whatever page you’re on and click the Share As Image bookmarklet to toss that text directly into an eye-catching image.

***

Twitter Tools for Mentions & Monitoring

50. Warble: Alerts every time your blog posts are shared

Get an email whenever someone shares from your website—even if they don’t mention your username or if they use a link shortener. Warble also does full keyword, mention, and hashtag tracking.

51. Keyhole: LIke Google Alerts for Twitter

Ask Keyhole to notify you whenever a particular keyword, hashtag, or URL is mentioned. Helpful to track mentions of your own name or your company’s blog or campaign.

52. The One Million Tweetmap: Geolocated, real-time tweet monitoring

Track and follow keywords as they’re tweeted in real-time and at real places. Zoom in to a geotargeted area for super fine results.

53. Twilert: Real-time email alerts for keywords

Track keywords on Twitter and receive an email notification every time they’re mentioned. Great for keeping an eye on company names, new products, and branded hashtags.

54. Mention: Monitor your mentions

A listening tool for keeping up with all your mentions on Twitter. Tracks, analyzes, and displays any number of keywords via the Mention dashboard or via email digests.

55. MentionMapp: The web of you and those you mention

Get a visualization map of you and all the people you mention (and they people they mention).

56. Twazzup: Real-time keyword monitoring

Search and track any keyword, username, or hashtag. See a results page full of relevant tweets, user accounts, and influencers.

***

Twitter Tools for Scheduling Tweets

57. Buffer: Schedule your tweets (plus a whole lot more)

Simple social media management. Fill a queue of tweets, analyze their performance, and find new, hand-picked stories to share.

We also take a lot of inspiration from the great work of Hootsuite and Sprout Social, which offer an amazing list of management tools.

58. Tweet4me: Scheduled tweets via DM

Send a direct message to the Tweet4me account, use shorthand and prefixes to denote when to share, and let Tweet4me schedule and send the tweet for you.

***

Twitter Tools for Timing

59. Followerwonk: Search Twitter bios and analyze your followers

Every analysis imaginable for your Twitter feed, your profile, your followers, and your competitors.

60. Tweriod: Find the best times to tweet

Tweriod analyzes the tweets you send and your followers’s tweets to find the optimal time for engagement.

***

Twitter Tools for Trending Topics

61. Trends24: Detailed breakdowns of trending terms

See trending terms from the last—you guessed it—24 hours, broken out hour-by-hour and country-by-country. Enlightening for social media campaigns and geographic/timing research.

62. Trendsmap: Monitoring for local Twitter trends

A zoomable map that shows popular hashtags and terms from anywhere in the world with easy-click buttons to hone in on My City, My Region, and more.

63. iTrended: Did it trend?

Search the past 15 days to find whether certain keywords trended or not.

***

Top Twitter Clients

64. Tweetdeck: The king of Twitter clients

Via the app or the web, stay on top of your Twitter stream with Tweetdeck’s organization and tracking tools. Split your stream into segmented columns to stay engaged with what’s important.

65. YoruFukurou – Twitter client

A native Twitter client for Mac OS X. Dashboard views of incoming tweets, lists, and searches, split across multiple tabs. Comes highly recommended from Kottke.org.

66. Happy Friends: Mailbox-type reader

Pick the friends you want to hear from. Never miss their tweets. View all their activity via an inbox-style layout with nested updates.

67. Twitterific: Twitter client for iOS

Powerful Twitter client for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, with cool features like color-coded timelines and muffled keywords or hashtags.

***

Miscellaneous Twitter Tools

68. Like Explorer: See shares per article

Type in a URL. See the share numbers. Simple.

69. Twitter Feed – Serve your feed automatically to Twitter (and others)

Post a new article on your site. Send a tweet automatically.

70. TW Birthday: Dig up the date someone joined Twitter (even if they won’t say)

For those who omit the “date joined” on their profile, there’s still a way to discover it. See how long your new favorite follow has been tweeting or when a new profile officially landed.

71. Bio is Changed: be alerted when someone changes their Twitter bio (good for job moves)

Rather self-descriptive, this tool updates you when someone changes their Twitter bio. Useful if you’d like to track job moves and major news or even to learn from how people craft unique Twitter bios.

72. and 73. IFTTT & Zapier: Automate your tweeting

Connect multiple apps in unique ways to your Twitter account. For example, post your Instagram pictures as native Twitter photos.

74. Be Present: Track how fast you respond on Twitter

Real-time reports on your response time, response rate, and performance based on industry benchmarks. Also, really pretty to look at.

75. SavePublishing: Tweetable snippets on any website

Install the bookmarklet, and you can reveal any tweetable sentences (140 characters or fewer) from any article.

76. GroupTweet: Collaborate with teammates on one account

Let your teammates and coworkers share to the same account automatically with zero password-sharing. GroupTweet can even append usernames on to the end of individual tweets.

77. Storify: Beautiful Twitter storytelling

Grab any number of tweets and media elements, and place them all into a Storify collection that you can embed and share anywhere.

78. Tweet Topic Explorer: A word cloud per user

Discover the most-used words of any user you choose (even you).

79. Listen to Twitter: Listen to the sentiment of tweets

Type in a keyword and hear an audio track based on the sentiment of the tweets with that keyword.

80. Squall: Write more than 140 characters

Write however long you want, and Squall takes your text and turns it into an image to share with your tweet.

81. Thunderclap: Automated advocacy

Start a new campaign on Thunderclap, and if you get enough supporters to signup, Thunderclap will send your message out automatically through all your supporters’s Twitter accounts.

82. Periscope & Meerkat: Livestreaming

Live stream video of whatever you’re up to.

83. Twitterfav: Automatic favorites and RTs

Preselect tweets to be favorites or RT’ed based on rules you create.

84. Click to Tweet: Get people tweeting your content

Add a highlighted snippet of easily-tweetable text to your website or blog post.

85. Bedazzle: Rich text editor for Twitter, using unicode

Tons of options to make what looks like fancy fonts and styles in your tweet text (it’s really just unicode characters). Looks great on Macs, and perhaps not so much on Windows PCs.

86. Pullquote: Grab quotes of text from any web page and share easily

Available as Chrome extension, iOS app, and bookmarklet.

87. Who Tweeted It First: Find a story’s origin

Enter a keyword to see which person was the first to tweet it.

88. Little Pork Chop: Tweet storm

Write more than 140 characters, and Little Pork Chop chops your text into Twitter-sized snippets, posting them all one after the other.

89. Hubbble: Favorite reminder system

Favorite as many things as you’d like, and Hubbble will email you later to remind you to follow up on your faves.

90. Nudge: Reminders to engage on Twitter

Select tweets that you can boomerang back for followup later on.

91. SocialHunt: Track all activity for up to 5 tweeps

Receive an email every time someone shares to Twitter. Set the frequency from “now” to “daily.”

Additional resources:

• Twitter UK head of news Joanna Geary put together a Twitter collection of tools.
• Tim Carmody at Kottke.org shared a few of his favorite Twitter tools, too.
• A few great suggestions from some Twitter friends of mine.
• Our big list of 61 social media tools for small businesses.
• Our 29 free marketing tools.

What are your go-to Twitter tools?

Which tools are must-haves for you with your Twitter experience?

Which Twitter tools have you already used today?

My mornings always start with a read of News.me (the email version of Digg Deeper) and a dip into Buffer to check some stats. I spend most of my Twitter time replying to others directly from the native web app. In the evenings, I’ll grab some content suggestions from Buffer, Swayy, BuzzSumo, and a couple others and fill the Twitter queue for the next day.

I’d love to hear about your favorite Twitter tools in the comments!

Image credits: Riffle, Markus Spiske, Tweetdeck, Happy Friends

The post The Big List of Twitter Tools: 91 Free Twitter Tools and Apps to Fit Any Need appeared first on Social.

Advanced Local SEO Competition Analysis

Posted by Casey_Meraz

Competition in local search is fierce. While it's typical to do some surface level research on your competitors before entering a market, you can go much further down the SEO rabbit hole. In this article we will look at how you can find more competitors, pull their data, and use it to beat them in the search game.

Since there are plenty of resources out there on best practices, this guide will assume that you have already followed the best practices for your own listing and are looking for the little things that might make a big difference in putting you over your competition. So if you haven't already read how to perform the Ultimate Local SEO Audit or how to Find and Build Citations then you should probably start there.

Disclaimer: While it's important to mention that correlation does not mean causation, we can learn a lot by seeing what the competition has done.

Some of the benefits of conducting competitive research are:

• You can really dive into your customers' market and understand it better.
• You can figure out who your real customers area and better target them.
• You can get an understanding of what your competitors have done that has been successful without re-inventing the wheel.

Once you isolate trends that seem to make a positive difference, you can create a hypothesis and test. This allows you to constantly be testing, finding out what works, and growing those positive elements while eliminating the things that don't produce results. Instead of making final decisions off of emotion, make your decisions off of the conversion data.

A good competition analysis will give you a strong insight into the market and allow you to test, succeed, or fail fast. The idea behind this process is to really get a strong snapshot of your competition at a glance to isolate factors you may be missing in your company's online presence.

Disclaimer 2: It's good to use competitors' ideas if they work, but don't make that your only strategy.

Before we get started

Below I will cover a process I commonly use for competition analysis. I have also created this Google Docs spreadsheet for you to follow along with and use for yourself. To make your own copy simply go to File > Make A Copy. (Don't ask me to add you as an owner please :)

Let's get started

1. Find out who your real competitors are

Whether you work internally or were hired as an outside resource to help with your client's SEO campaign, you probably have some idea of who the competition is in your space. Some companies may have good offline marketing but poor online marketing. If you're looking to be the best, it's a good idea to do your own research and see who you're up against.

In my experience it's always good to find and verify 5-10 online competitors in your space from a variety of sources. You can use tools for this or take the manual approach. Keep in mind that you have to screen the data tools give you with your own eye for accuracy.

How do you find your "real" competitors?

We're going to look at some tools you can use to find competitors here in a second, but keep in mind you want to record everything you find.

Make sure to capture the basic information for each competitor including their company name, location, and website. These tools will be useful at a later time. Record these in the "competitor research" tab of the spreadsheet.

Method 1: Standard Google searches for competitors

This is pointing out the obvious, but if you have a set of keywords you want to rank for, you can look for trends and see who is already ranking where you want to be. Don't limit this to just one or two keywords, instead get a broader list of the competitors out there.

To do this, simply come up with a list of several keywords you want to rank for and search for them in your geographic area. Make sure your Geographic preference is set correctly so you get accurate data.

1. Collect a list of keywords
2. Search Google to see which companies are ranking in the local pack
3. Record a list of the companies' names and website URLs in the spreadsheet under the competitor research tab.

To start we're just going to collect the data and enter it into the spreadsheet. We will revisit this data shortly.

Outside of the basics, I always find it's good to see who else is out there. Since organic and local rankings are more closely tied together than ever, it's a good idea to use 3rd party tools to get some insight as to what else your website could be considered related to.

This can help provide hidden opportunities outside of the normal competition you likely look at most frequently.

Method 2: Use SEMRUSH.com

SEMRush is a pretty neat competitive analysis tool. While it is a paid program, they do in fact have a few free visits a day you can check out. It's limited but it will show you 10 competitors based on keyword ranking data. It's also useful for recording paid competition as well.

To use the tool, visit www.SEMRush.com and enter your website in the provided search box and hit search. Once the page loads, you simply have to scroll down to the area that says "main competitors". If you click the "view full report" option you'll be taken to a page with 10 competition URLs.

Put these URLs into the spreadsheet so we can track them later.

Method 3: Use SPYFU.com

This is a cool tool that will show your top 5 competitors in paid and organic search. Just like SEMRush, it's a paid tool that's easy to use. On the home page, you will see a box that loads where you can enter your URL. Once you hit search, a list of 5 websites will populate for free.

Enter these competitors into your spreadsheet for tracking.

Method 4: Use Crunchbase.com

This website is a goldmine of data if you're trying to learn about a startup. In addition to the basic information we're looking for, you can also find out things like how much money they've raised, staff members, past employee history, and so much more.

Crunchbase also works pretty similarly to the prior tools in the sense that you you just enter your website URL and hit the search button. Once the page loads, you can scroll down the page to the competitors section for some data.

While Crunchbase is cool, it's not too useful for smaller companies as it doesn't seem to have too much data outside of the startup world.

Method 5: Check out Compete.com

This tool seems to have limited data for smaller websites but it's worth a shot. It can also be a little bit more high-level than I prefer, but you should still check it out.

To use the tool visit www.compete.com and enter the URL you want to examine in the box provided then hit search.

Click the "Find more sites like" box to get list of three related sites. Enter these in the provided spreadsheet.

Method 6: Use SimilarWeb.com

SimilarWeb provides a cool tool with a bunch of data to check out websites. After entering your information, you can scroll down to the similar sites section which will show websites it believes to be related.

The good news about SimilarWeb is that it seems to have data no matter how big or small your site is.

2. After you know who they are, mine their data

Now that we have a list of competitors, we can really do a deep dive to see who is ranking and what factors might be contributing to their success. To start, make sure to pick your top competitors from the spreadsheet and then look for and record the information below about each business on the Competitor Analysis tab.

You will want to to pull this information from their Google My Business page.

If you know the company's name, it's pretty easy to find them just by searching the brand. You can add the geographic location if it's a multi-location business.

For example if I was searching for a Wendy's in Parker, Colorado, I could simply search this: "Wendy's Parker, CO" and it will pull up the location(s).

Make sure to take and record the following information from their local listings. Get the data from their Google My Business (Google + Page) and record it in the spreadsheet!

1. Business name - Copy and paste the whole business name. Sometimes businesses keyword stuff a name or have a geographic modifier. It's important to account for this.
2. Address - The full address of the business location. Although we can't do anything about its physical location, we will search using this information shortly.
3. City, state, zip code - The city, state, and zip listed on the Google My Business listing.
4. Phone number - Take the listing's primary number
5. Phone number 2 - Take the listing's secondary number like an 800 number.
6. Landing page URL - The one connected to their Google My Business listing.
   PRO TIP: The URL will display as the root domain, but click the link to see if it takes you to an internal landing page. This is essential!
7. Number of categories - Does your listing have more or less categories than the listing?
8. Categories in Google My Business
   You can find the categories by clicking on the main category of the listing. It will pop out a list of all of the categories the business is listed under. If you only see one after doing this, open your browser and go to View Source. If you do Ctrl+F you can search the page for "GCID" without the quotes. This will show you the categories they're listed under if you look through the HTML.
9. Does the profile appear to be 100% complete?
10. How many reviews do they have?
11. Is their business name visible in Google Street View? Obviously there is not much we can do about this, but it's interesting especially considering some patents Bill Slawski was recently talking about.

** Record this information on the spreadsheet. A sample is below.

What can we do with this data?

Since you've already optimized your own listing for best practices, we want to see if there is any particular trends that seem to be working better in a certain area. We can then create a hypothesis and test it to see if any gains are losses are made. While we can't isolate factors, we can get some insight as to what's working the more you change it.

In my experience, examining trends is much easier when the data is side by side. You can easily pick out data that stands out from the rest.

3. Have a close(r) look at their landing pages

You already know the ins and outs of your landing page. Now let's look at each competitor's landing page individually. Let's look at the factors that carry the most weight and see if anything sticks out.

Record the following information into the spreadsheet and compare side by side with your company vs. the successful ones.

Page title of landing page

City present? - Is the city present in the landing page meta title?

State present? - Is the state present in the landing page meta title?

Major KW in title? Is there a major keyword in the landing page meta title?

Content length on landing page - Possibly minor but worth examining. Copy/paste into MS Word

H1 present? - Is the H1 tag present?

City in H1? - Does the H1 contain the city name?

State in H1? - Does the H1 have the state or abbreviation in the heading?

Keyword in H1? - Do they use a keyword in the H1?

Local business schema present? - Are they using schema? Find out using the Google structured data testing tool here.

Embedded map present? - Are they embedding a Google map?

GPS coordinates present? - Are they using GPS coordinates via schema or text?

4. Off site: See what google thinks is authoritative

Recently, I was having a conversation with a client who was super-excited about the efforts his staff was making. He proudly proclaimed that his office was building 10 new citations a day and added over 500 within the past couple of months!

His excitement freaked me out. As I suspected, when I asked to see his list, I saw a bunch of low quality directory sites that were passing little or no value. One way I could tell they were not really helping (besides the fact that some were NSFW websites), was that the citations or listings were not even indexed in Google.

I think it's a reasonable assumption that you should test to see what Google knows about your business. Whatever Google delivers about your brand, it's serving because it has the most relevance or authority in its eyes.

So how can we see what Google sees?

It's actually pretty simple. Just do a Google Search. One of the ways that I try to evaluate and see whether or not a citation website is authoritative enough is to take the competition's NAP and Google it. While you've probably done this many times before for citation earning, you can prioritize your efforts based off of what's recurring between top ranked competitor websites.

As you can see in the example below where I did a quick search for a competitor's dental office (by pasting his NAP in the search bar), I see that Google is associating this particular brand with websites like:

1. The company's main website
2. Whitepages
3. Amazon Local (New)
4. Rateadentist.com
5. DentalNeighbor.com

Pro Tip: Amazon local is relatively new, but you can see that it's going to carry a citation benefit in local search. If your clients are willing, you should sign up for this.

Don't want to copy and paste the NAP in a variety of formats? Use Andrew Shotland's NAP Hunter to get your competitor's variants. This tool will easily open multiple window tabs in your browser and search for combinations of your competitor's NAP listings. It makes it easy and it's kind of fun.

5. Check important citations

With citations, I'm generally in the ballpark of quality over quantity. That being said, if you're just getting the same citations that everyone else has, that doesn't really set you apart does it? I like to tell clients that the top citation sources are a must, but it's good to seek out opportunities and monitor what your competition does so you can keep up and stay ahead of the game.

You need to check the top citations and see where you're listed vs. your competition. Tools like Whitespark's local citation finder make this much easier to get an easy snapshot.

If you're looking to see which citations you should find and check, use these two resources below:

• Learn how to find and build the top citations here
• Top Citation Sources By Category

Just like in the example in the section above, you can find powerful hidden gems and also new website opportunities that arise from time to time.

Just because you did it once doesn't mean you should leave it alone

A common mistake I see is businesses thinking it's ok to just turn things off when they get to the top.That's a bad idea. If you're serious about online marketing, you know that someone is always out to get you. So in addition to tracking your brand mentions through the Fresh Web Explorer, you also need to be tracking your competition at least once a month! The good news is that you can do this easily with Fresh Web Explorer from Moz.

So what should you setup in Fresh Web Explorer?

• Your competitor's brand name - Monitor their mentions and see what type of marketing they're doing!
• Your competitor's NAP - Easily find new citations they're going after
• City+Industry+Keywords - Maybe there are some hidden gems outside of your competition you could go after!

Plus track anything else you can think of related to your brand. This will help the on-going efforts get a bit easier.

6. Figure out which citations have dofollow links

Did you know some citation sources have dofollow links which mean they pass link juice to your website? Now while these by themselves likely won't pass a lot of juice, it adds an incentive for you to be proactive with recording and promoting these listings.

When reviewing my competition's citations and links I use a simple Chrome plugin called NoFollow which simply highlights nofollow links on pages. It makes it super easy to see what's a follow vs. a nofollow link.

But what's the benefit of this? Let's say that I have a link on a city website that's a follow link and a citation. If it's an authority page that talks highly about my business, it would make sense for me to link to it from time to time. If you're getting links from websites other than your own and linking to these high quality citations you will pass link juice to your page. It's a pretty simple way of increasing the authority of your local landing pages.

7. Links, links, links

Since the Pigeon update almost a year ago, links started to make a bigger impact in local search. You have to be earning links and you have to earn high quality links to your website and especially your Google My Business Landing page.

If the factors show you're on the same playing field as your competition except in domain authority or page authority, you know your primary focus needs to be links.

Now here is where the research gets interesting. Remember the data sources we pulled earlier like compete, spyfu.com, etc? We are now going to get a bigger picture on the link profile because we did this extra work. Not only are we just going to look at the links that our competition in the pack has, we've started to branch out of that for more ideas which will potentially pay off big in the long run.

What to do now

Now we want to take every domain we looked at when we started and run Open Site Explorer on each and every domain. Once we have these lists of links, we can then sort them out and go after the high quality ones that you don't already have.

Typically, when I'm doing this research I will export everything into Excel or Google Docs, combine them into one spreadsheet and then sort from highest authority to least authority. This way you can prioritize your road map and focus on the bigger fish.

Keep in mind that citations usually have links and some links have citations. If they have a lot of authority you should make sure you add both.

8. But what about user behavior?

If you feel like you've gone above and beyond your competition and yet you're not seeing the gains you want, there is more you have to look at. Sometimes as an SEO it's easy to get in a paradigm of just the technical or link side of things. But what about user behavior?

It's no secret and even some recent tests are showing promising data. If your users visit your site and then click back to the search results it indicates that they didn't find what they were looking for. Through our own experiments we have seen listings in the SERPs jump a few positions in hours just based off of user behavior.

So what does this mean for you?

You need to make sure your pages are answering the users queries as they land on your page, preferably above the fold. For example, if I'm looking for a haircut place and I land on your page, I might be wanting to know the hours, pricing, or directions to your store. Making information prevalent is essential.

Make sure that if you're going to make these changes you test them. Come up with a hypothesis, test the results, and come to conclusion or another test based off of the data. If you want to know more about your users, I say that you need to find as much about them as human possible. Some services you can use for that are:

1. Inspectlet - Record user sessions and watch how they navigate your website. This awesome tool literally allows you to watch recorded user sessions. Check out their site.

2. LinkedIn Tracking Script - Although I admit it's a bit creepy, did you know that you can see the actual visitors to your website if they're logged into LinkedIn while browsing your website? You sure can. To do this complete the following steps:

1. Sign up for a LinkedIn Premium Account
2. Enter this code into the body of your website pages:

<img src="https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?authToken=zRgB&authType=name&id=XXXXX" />

3. Replace the XXXXX with your account number of your profile. You can get this by logging into your profile page and getting the number present after viewid?=
4. Wait for the visitors to start showing up under "who's viewed your profile"

3. Google Analytics - Watch user behavior and gain insights as so what they were doing on your website.

Reviews

Speaking of user behavior, is your listing the only one without reviews? Does it have fewer or less favorable reviews? All of these are negative signals for user experience. Do you competitors have more positive reviews? If so you need to work getting more.

Meta descriptions

While this post was mainly geared towards local SEO as in Google My Business rankings, you have to consider that there are a lot of localized search queries that do not generate pack results. In these cases they're just standard organic listings.

If you've been deterred to add these by Google picking its own meta descriptions or by their lack of ranking benefit, you need to check yourself before you wreck yourself. Seriously. Customers will make a decision on which listing to click on based on this information. If you're not thinking about optimizing these for user intent on the corresponding page then you're just being lazy. Spend the time, increase CTR, and increase your rankings if you're serving great content.

Conclusion

The key to success here is realizing that this is a marathon and not a sprint. If you examine the competition in the top areas mentioned above and create a plan to overcome, you will win long term. This of course also assumes you're not doing anything shady and staying above board.

While there were many more things I could add to this article, I believe that if you put your focus on what's mentioned here you'll have the greatest success. Since I didn't talk too much about geo-tagged media in this article, I also included some other items to check in the spreadsheet under the competitor analysis tab.

Remember to actively monitor what those around you are doing and develop a pro-active plan to be successful for your clients.

What's the most creative thing you have seen a competitor do successfully local search? I would love to hear about it in the comments below.

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