Any good marketer knows that in order to stay ahead of the game these days, you have to take advantage of everything that social media has to offer. This isn’t just a place where people go to chat and play games. Social media is one of the best marketing tools to come along in decades. But, you need to know how to be productive and not just waste your time fooling around on social media websites. There are tools you can use to be more productive with your social media marketing. Here are seven of our favorites.

• Crystal Knows – Get real time coaching for all social media conversations. Import contacts from social media and Google to get personality reports. Use this information, get coaching, and access personality data from millions of profiles to learn about others before you get into discussions with them. The more you know about them, the better your discussions are going to be in the long run.
• Time Doctor – Do you know how you spend your time? You might think you do, but if you really break it down and look at it, you might just find that you waste a lot of time in the run of a day. Time Doctor can help you figure out where you are spending your time, and how get your life back on the right track. This is the ultimate time management tool, and one that all social media marketers need to take advantage of in order to get the most out of their marketing efforts.
• WriteRack – If you really want to start a Tweetstorm, but you don’t want to spend hours creating Tweets, here is a tool that you need to start using now. WriteRack will create Tweets for you. All you have to do is type or copy and paste the information you want to send out. WriteRack will format the information into a series of Tweets. It will also post them for you, one after the other, in the correct order. This is free to use, so there is no reason not to check it out now.
• Polish My Writing – Check out “After the Deadline” at the Polish My Writing website. Here you can enter anything that you have written, and you will get a critique of everything from spelling and grammar to style suggestions and more. It is free to use this tool, and it can really do a lot to help improve your writing skills. If you are relying on social media for marketing, you need to be able to write well, and this tool will give you the edge you need.
• Hey Focus – Even though social media is your focus, it can also be pretty distracting. You get on a site to make a post, and you end up checking out other posts, chatting playing games, etc. All of the sudden, you have completely lost focus of what you were doing. It happens to the best of us. But, you can take steps to change that. This Mac app lets you block the websites that are distracting you from getting things done.
• Reedsy – Maybe you want to take the next step and actually write a book, and you want to use social media to promote it. Reedsy is a great tool for this. You can use it to find just the right team for your book (editors, graphic designers, etc.) to collaborate on projects. Their team will help you find the right people, and provide you with the tools you need to work together for awesome project results.
• FoxType – This is another tool that will help you to become a better writer, even if you are only writing short paragraphs and Tweets. Simply copy and paste your document into FoxType, and it will tell you all kinds of interesting things. Anything highlighted in red is bad, such as jargon words, poor sentence structure, etc. You can also use this tool to check for things like formality, politeness, get alternative words, and much more.

Bonus

In addition to the above tools, we thought we would give you a bonus, and talk about some cool tricks for social media marketers.

• Use an Editorial Calendar – You can save yourself a lot of time if you use an editorial calendar. It will help you plan out all of your content, so you know exactly what you need to post, where, and when. Things you will find in your calendar include pitched posts (ideas for new posts), assigned posts (taken from pitched and assigned to team members), in progress posts, drafts without images, and final reviews. This is going to keep your blogging and writing a lot more organized.
• Be Choosy about Social Networks – Not all social networks work for marketing all types of businesses. You need to narrow in on the ones that work for you, and concentrate your efforts there. Don’t waste a lot of time on the social networks that aren’t working for your business. To know which ones are best, you will need to take advantage of analytics tools to get all of the metrics.
• Be Picky about Content – You need to publish the right content for your audience. This means that you need to learn as much about your audience as possible, and then write in a way that markets directly to them. Content that gets the best results includes content that is optimized for search engine results, content that competitors see traffic with, and content that gets shared a lot.
• Rehash Old Content – Just because you have already published something, it doesn’t mean that you should never publish it again. In fact, it is just the opposite in many cases. If the content is really great, it deserves another go around. Or, it may be that some of your audience missed it the first time it was published. You can continue to get value from older posts if you keep sharing them every so often.

This piece was originally written by Jane Hurst for the Heyo Blog.