Ten tools for social media practioners
FollowWhether you are a web creator, blogger, engineer, educator, journalist, marketing specialist or a scientist, with ever-emerging opportunities to share information on digital platforms, the importance to keep digital skills up-to-date is vital.
Here’s our list of top ten online useful tools for helping and fostering digital literacy skills on web, in everyday work.
Buffer Business Tools
If you are a content creator, writer or analyst on the web, the best features Buffer has to offer that can help with your increasingly complex social publishing needs are: the analytics and reporting for business customers. Buffer also added graphs so you can visualize your stats and you can compare post types, like posts per day and clicks or retweets.
Beside the fact that Buffer have an option to add multiple team members and more social accounts in your team, there is a Business analytics now offering integration with Google Analytics as well. This option enables much easier to track and report on your specific marketing campaigns, or those of your clients. More at: https://bufferapp.com/
Image source: http://blog.bufferapp.com/introducing-buffer-for-business-the-most-simple-powerful-social-media-tool-for-your-business
Datawrapper
Datawrapper is a great open source tool helping anyone to create simple, correct and embeddable charts in minutes, for visualising large datasets. This tool reduces the time needed to create a correct chart and embed it into any website from hours to seconds. You can clean up your data, upload it and choose from numerous interactive formats to help you create the content and tell your story. The hosted service is free, or you can install it on your own server for maximum control. You can even make the data downloadable for interested readers and clients. More at: http://datawrapper.de
Google Media Tools
Google’s Media Tools present a toolbox of exciting digital tools that can enhance newsgathering and exposure across television, radio, print and online, suitable for journalists, reporters, web content creators, and those involved in social media analytics. These tools feature range from Develop & Publish, learning how to visualize data using Google Maps, improving your audience engagement through Google+, Google Earth Pro to Advanced Search, that provide an advanced super powered search capabilities, and allows you to filter your results by region, keyword and time. More at: http://www.google.com/get/mediatools/
LinkedIn Instream Ads
LinkedIN Sponsored Updates enables you to put custom in-stream content in front of the specific LinkedIn professionals your business wants to work with.
Assuming you already have a Company Page and that you are publishing regular updates to your followers, the next step is to turn on the LinkedIn Sponsored Updates option that provides a native solution for rapidly increasing awareness and shaping the perception of your brand, products, and services.
More at: http://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/content-marketing/sponsored-updates.html
Hashtagify.me – The Most Advanced Twitter Hashtags Search Engine
Hashtafigy is a free tool that promotes the best use of hashtags by finding and understanding them in a quick, intuitive, visual way. Hashtags are one of the best ways to find and reach the right audience for your message on social media, and this tool helps innovators with the visualisation of Twitter hashtags related to a particular tag.
Hashtagify.me allows you to search among 26,995,169 Twitter hashtags and quickly find the best ones for your need based on their popularity, relationships, languages, influencers and other metrics.
School of Data
School of Data brings free online tutorials, courses and tools for those who are working with data and open data. School of Data works to empower civil society organisations, journalists, analysts, scientists, researchers, and citizens with the skills they need to use data effectively. Many of the groups who are closest to the problems currently “lack the skills to use data effectively — and even an awareness of the potential of data for their work. School of Data’s mission is to teach people how to gain powerful insights and create compelling stories using data.”
Beside tutorials and courses, School of Data is providing online resources for extracting, cleaning, analyzing, presenting and sharing the data. More: http://schoolofdata.org/online-resources/
Advanced English Dictionary and Thesaurus
The Dictionary is a large lexical database of English with up to 140,000 entries and more than 1.4 million words, developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA. The WordNet dictionary is organised with an innovative format providing dictionary definitions. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive
It also demonstrates how words link together, presents examples to illustrate word usage, antonyms, and synonyms, interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. This approach means you can find the meanings of words, discover alternatives, and learn how different words relate to each other.
Also, it is available both for Android phones https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobisystems.msdict.embedded.wireless.wordnet&hl=en and iPhones https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/advanced-english-dictionary/id291070079?mt=8
Editorially
Editorially is a new collaborative writing and editing platform. The goal of this platform is to support and encourage the writing process for writers, editors, publishers, designers, and engineers — from the first flash of inspiration all the way through to publication. A markdown-based writing environment lets you focus on the words and create clean markup easily; collaboration tools enables you to invite friends and colleagues to review or edit your work; a document version system lets you mark places in a document’s history and compare versions; notes and activity feeds encourage you to reflect on your work; and discussion threads recognize that the conversation around a text is just as important as the text itself. More at: https://editorially.com/
Sitespeed.io
Sitespeed.io is an open source tool that helps you analyze your website speed and performance based on performance best practices and metrics. It collects data from multiple pages on your website, analyze the pages using the rules and output the result as HTML or JUnit XML.
You can analyze one site, analyze & compare multiple sites or let it run in your CI tool to make sure that your site is always built the best way for speed. Sitespeed.io is released under the terms of the Apache License Version 2.0.
Focus Booster
My favourite and best pomodoro technique tool that I use for everyday work and enhances concentration, productivity and fights the procrastination is Focus Booster.
The pomodoro technique is a time management methodology created by Francesco Cirillo. Pomodoro enables you to take the stress out of deadlines by breaking down your day into segments, you work solidly during these periods and remove all distractions. At the end of the pomodoro session you reward yourself with a break.
Focus booster is a digital pomodoro timer to help you implement the pomodoro technique as quickly and efficiently as possible. Focus booster is easy to use and it comes in two versions, a free desktop timer and pomodoro app and a free online timer and it has versions for both pomodoro on Mac and windows. More at: http://www.focusboosterapp.com/