3 tools to boost your social media efforts

A vast software ecosystem has sprung up around social media, with tools and services serving a variety of editorial and marketing needs, from audience development to sentiment analysis. Here are three tools whose tires publishers might want to kick to see if they can get more out of their social media investments.

Twitter optimization: Twylah

The shelf life of a tweet can be measured in minutes. The stream stops for no one. Twylah is a social platform that helps companies (or individuals) capture more value from their Twitter streams by repackaging their tweets into a branded website.

Twylah’s software organizes a brand’s tweets, including images and video, into “trending topics” and presents them through a web interface.  Topics are determined by the frequency and reach of the items you tweet.

“Your social content becomes much more durable because the life of a tweet is extended,” Eric Kim, founder and CEO of Twylah, said in a phone interview. “You can also optimize those tweets for search to extend the reach further.”

The page is hosted by Twylah (e.g., http://www.twylah.com/dwell) or on a brand’s subdomain (e.g., http://tweets.cooking.com/). Hosting on a subdomain offers a publisher more control over the content and traffic.  Users can also create a widget that highlights trending topics, of the brand or individual journalists, on their main website.

Lead generation: NetBase

NetBase offers a “social intelligence” platform for monitoring social media and creating “structured insights” designed to aid social engagement decision-making. NetBase and Pivot released a case study this week about how NetBase helped the organizers of the Pivot Conference, a social business conference held earlier this week in New York, create targeted messages to attract sponsors and attendees.

Pivot used the NetBase platform to identify segments of individuals who frequently used four terms on social networks: "social brand," "social business," "social enterprise," and "social marketing.” The Pivot sales team then used NetBase to cross-reference those segments to generate a list of target brands, for example, popular in the social enterprise arena. Pivot also targeted potential attendees by focusing on Twitter shares of Pivot-related content. The targeting helped Pivot reach its attendee goals two months faster than in previ­ous years.

Overall, Pivot’s use of NetBase decreased the time its team spent on social lead generation by 12% while increasing the number of leads by 33%.

Social media optimization: Perfect Market

Perfect Market, whose revenue optimization platform originally focused on search traffic, is working on a social media widget for its Perfect Market Pro offering as a way to increase social traffic to websites.

“With more users getting their news through social, we’re looking at ways to help publishers drive traffic from those networks,” Jessica Lewis, Perfect Market’s VP of product management, said in a phone interview. “We don’t want to go as far as social readers, but we can give users a better forum for sharing content with people who would be interested in reading about that topic.”

Those interests will be determined by a combination of Perfect Market’s semantic technology and the user’s own social connections. This combination, Lewis said, “moves beyond a basic recommendation by adding an emotional connection. The potential virality is huge, and the end result is more traffic through social for the publisher.”

Perfect Market is currently beta testing the social media widget with select publishers.  General release is expected in the first quarter of 2013, Lewis said.