Democratic New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s public health order suspending open and concealed carry across Albuquerque could endanger domestic abuse victims and serve as an unconstitutional power grab similar to the COVID lockdowns, according to experts.
Joyce Lee Malcolm, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, told Fox News Digital that Americans are now “very alert” to the dangers of an elected official like Lujan Grisham “dreaming up” a health emergency to declare new powers, noting that it is tough to take such measures back or set proper parameters.
“She said this is just a 30-day ban. How is the 30-day ban going to change if it truly is a public health emergency? The COVID bans were supposed to be just a couple of weeks before the curve was flattened, then we had more than two years of governors picking and choosing how many people you could have over for Thanksgiving,” Malcolm said. “I mean, it’s a very dangerous thing to give anybody emergency powers.”
Malcolm admitted that she did not think the “shocking” order would make it very far, considering the extensive public backlash across the political dial. She added that she was heartened to see public officials stand up to Lujan Grisham’s order and admit they would not enforce it.
“They take an oath,” Malcom said. “And I think there’s no point taking an oath if you don’t take it seriously. It’s supposed to be a solemn oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. And they are not about to violate that oath.”
The Liberal Gun Club National Spokesperson Lara Smith said she is concerned that the governor has exposed thousands of domestic violence victims who carry a permit for protection to potential violence or risk becoming felons.
“I have a real issue with that,” she said. “Domestic violence, for the most part, open and concealed carry isn’t going to stop the perpetrators because either they don’t care about the law or it’s not happening when they’re opening or concealed carrying in their home.”
Breaking down gun violence into several subcategories, Smith said by far the most firearm deaths come from suicide, which open or concealed carry does not affect.
She said some recent studies show a possible uptick in street violence in states where open carry is allowed. While she said it is not entirely clear why or by how much, she has found no evidence that concealed carry increases any gun violence at all.
“As a matter of fact, most of the evidence shows that it decreases it because people who are concealed carry tend to have more training and tend to be more aware,” she said.
Smith said that suicide prevention and mental health funding have shown to be far more successful in curbing gun violence in communities across the U.S.
Furthermore, she noted that violence interruption programs such as Project Ceasefire and the capital regional violence programs have produced “amazing” results.
The impact of gun violence on schools has also been a major topic of concern for politicians and nonprofit organizations for several decades. Smith said that “See Something Say Something” programs, wherein students are told to alert adults if they are concerned for a classmate or suspect someone may use a firearm, have been “incredibly helpful.”
Regarding mass shootings, Smith said research has shown shooters are often motivated by images of violence and news they see online, something which is almost “contagious.”
“If we can get the news to stop naming and putting photos up of mass shooters, that in and of itself really reduces the impulse for the next person. I would say that it helps with the contagion issue,” she said.
Georgia College and State University Assistant Professor of Business Law Nicholas Creel, also said he finds it very difficult to see how Lujan Grisham’s “blanket suspension” will survive judicial challenge. While the suspension is temporary and geographically limited, Creel said any law or executive action that limits the rights conveyed by the Second Amendment has an “incredibly high bar to clear.”
“Any curtailment of a fundamental right like the right to bear arms must be narrowly tailored, using the least restrictive means to achieve a compelling government interest. The governor’s ban comes off as far too sweeping to meet that standard, and so I fully expect it to be struck down,” Creel added.
Smith expressed concern that Lujan Grisham’s order would waste taxpayers’ money and burden the state through lawsuits. If the state is spending time, money and resources trying to defend its ineffective policies, Smith worried it would take away from programs that have been shown to work.
“I don’t see her move as popular on the left. I mean, some anti-gun politicians, at least in California, have come out and said, no, this is terrible. Right? This is just a dumb move. I wish the politicians who were doing things like this would really look at how much these things are going to cost.”
“Gov. Grisham’s actions are blatantly unconstitutional,” The Constitution Study Founder Paul Engel told Fox News Digital. “Contrary to her assertions, there is no ’emergency clause’ in the Constitution. As the supreme law of the land (Article VI, Clause 2), it cannot be superseded by the Congress, President, or a state governor. Therefore, her action is void, as recognized by the Supreme Court in Norton v. Shelby County: 118 U.S. 425 (1886).”
Engel said that while many people are focusing on the Second Amendment violation, Lujan Grisham’s actions also violate the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment.
“Should she, or anyone in her government, actually attempt to fine someone for violation of her illegal order, they would not only be violating the Fourth Amendment’s unreasonable search & seizure clause but committing a federal crime under 18 USC §242,” he said.
Malcolm cited District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) and New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen (2022) as recent examples of the Supreme Court clarifying the Second Amendment.
“The Supreme Court has found in these three recent decisions that people have the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense and other lawful purposes, that self-defense is absolutely crucial, because no matter how many police forces you have or how active they are, they can’t be there all the time,” she said.
She added that places with stringent gun laws tend to have more crime because the legislation is only abided by lawful citizens, not criminals.
Malcolm, who wrote the book “Guns and Violence: The English Experience,” recalled how the 1996 Dunblane massacre in Scotland eventually led to Parliament implementing new laws that ended with a near-total ban on handguns.
“Ten years after they took everybody’s handgun, handgun crime had double. So, taking away weapons from law-abiding citizens is not the way to have a safer society,” she said.
According to Malcolm, Lujan Grisham’s order violates the National Constitution and Bill of Rights and supersedes New Mexico’s Constitution and laws.
“She says, well, no law is absolute, nor is her oath to defend the Constitution,” Malcolm said. “So apparently, any time she feels like the Constitution isn’t really giving her what she wants or that there’s some proclaimed emergency, she says, you know, she can basically take away people’s individual rights.”
Lujan Grisham’s office did not return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
For more Culture, Media, Education, Opinion and channel coverage, visit foxnews.com/media
Imagine running a retail business without knowing how much you’re paying your wholesaler for goods. Or running a restaurant without looking at the price of your ingredients. Or constructing homes without looking at the price of raw materials… you get the idea.
That lack of transparency would be frightening, but hey, things could still work out, right?
Well, let’s up the difficulty.
Imagine that, on top of not knowing exactly how much you were paying for your inputs, you also didn’t know if you would have consistent and continued access to your wholesaler, your food supplier, or your building materials. That would almost certainly induce high blood pressure, stomach ulcers, and mild insomnia.
In the world of private credit (this is basically business credit for the majority of companies), it’s not only normal but expected that getting and maintaining access to debt capital (one of the key inputs for running any business!) will be opaque, error-prone, and hard to operationalize. In other words, capital uncertainty is the dismal reality in middle-market finance.
Private credit is enormous (add up all the VC dollars spent last year and you’d still be short of the amount of private credit issued over the same period), unavoidable, and broken.
That means credit access–the fuel or primary financial input for most medium-sized businesses–is hard to price, access, report on, and predict.
And yet it doesn’t have to be that way; the data and operational issues of private credit have been solved in other domains (e.g., CRMs for Sales, infrastructure tooling for devs, EMRs for hospitals). What’s missing is a software layer for business finance.
Finley has built the system of record for private credit. We plug into all borrower source systems and automate reporting and analysis for private credit lenders. The result is full transparency into the cost and availability of capital, which gives businesses newfound financial predictability.
We’re a team of builders, designers, finance experts, engineers, and systems thinkers from top companies in finance and technology, and we’re backed by leading investors like Y Combinator, CRV, and Bain Capital Ventures.
We’re two years into our journey, recently raised a $17 million Series A, and already managing over $3 billion in private credit.
It’s still Day 1, though. The challenges we’re taking on will reshape the economy over the next decades, and we’d love to partner with team members who share our passion for innovation and company-building.
With the sunsetting of Universal Analytics (UA) on the horizon in 2023, it’s more important than ever to learn how to create a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) landing page report.
Change can be difficult. What steps are you taking to get ahead of the curve?
While this post is not an ultimate guide to Google Analytics, I’ll show you how to get GA4 set up and give you the best GA4 tips out there. From setting yourself up to best practices, by the time you’re finished, you’ll feel confident creating a landing page report in GA4.
What Is GA4?
Google Analytics 4 is the latest edition of one of the greatest web analytics tools on the market.
With a landing page report in GA4, you can follow the digital path your customers travel along your branded content.
The best part? GA4 landing page reports track customer data from all the platforms your content is on to determine trends in traffic, engagement, product demand, predictions, and more.
It accomplishes these incredible analytic feats with the help of artificial intelligence. With the use of AI, GA4 helps you figure out how customers are currently using your content, as well as predict what customers will do next.
You don’t have to be a large business to make GA4 work for you. In fact, a recent survey by Enlyft found that roughly 71% of businesses that use Google Analytics are small companies with less than 50 employees.
While this may all sound similar to what you’re used to in Universal Analytics, the two function quite differently.
The biggest difference between UA and GA4 is the way data is collected and organized. While the former groups user interactions into time-blocked “sessions,” GA4 tracks each and every user interaction as its own event.
What does this mean? Well, because of this key switch, GA4 is better at predicting the behavior of customers in a wider variety of ways.
What Is A Landing Page Report in GA4?
Simply put, a GA4 landing page report is a detailed analysis of user interactions based on metrics that you choose.
For those who don’t know, a landing page is the page that is a user’s first interaction with your website or platform. For example, if you searched for information about landing page reports and clicked on the link for this article, then this page is your landing page for my site.
A landing page report in GA4 gives you deeper analytic tools that can really help you develop the best SEO strategy.
If you’re familiar with UA, you’ll remember that their landing page report was automatically generated. All you had to do was look for the report by clicking the Behavior drop-down menu. and from there. clicking Site Content and then Landing Pages.
GA4 is not automatic. Fortunately, it only takes a few steps to get your GA4 set-up.
Creating Your Landing Page Report In GA4
GA4 landing page reports must be generated manually. The good news is you can create your own preset landing page report, so you don’t have to set it all up each time you need information.
Follow these steps to create your own landing page report in GA4.
Get Started
Log in to your account with GA4. From there, open your Reports (the button below the Home icon, with a bar graph inside a white square). Next, click on Acquisition and then look for and select Traffic Acquisition in the dropdown menu.
Pull a Report
In case you don’t already know, dimensions are essentially the qualitative titles or categories being measured by GA4. When you choose Traffic Acquisition, GA4 will pull a report for you, automatically using the Session default channel grouping dimension.
While this is great info for you to know in order to increase traffic to your website, it’s not the data on user landing page interactions.
Customize Your Report
To create a custom landing page in GA4 to suit your analytical needs, click on the small pencil icon in the upper right corner of the user window.
In addition to adding new dimensions, the Customize Report button can add new metrics, rework charts and create summary cards.
For our purposes, we’ll focus for now on the dimension aspect.
Add a New Dimension
On the right side of the screen, click on Dimensions and then select Add dimension.
From there, you should be able to scroll through the options until you find one labeled Landing Page. Click it, and landing pages will be added to your primary dimensions.
Don’t forget to save when you’re done!
Set as Default
Let’s get real: do you actually want to go through those steps every time you want to analyze user interaction on landing pages?
No way! Follow this quick GA4 tip to make a shortcut for yourself.
Locate the Landing Page dimension once more. This time click on the three vertical dots and then select Set as Default.
When you are finished, click the Apply button in the lower right corner to save your new default setting.
If your goal is to replicate the UA report as close as possible, you will need to follow a few more steps.
Customize Metrics
Not all engagement metrics are created equal. As you become more familiar with the GA4 set-up, explore all the data at your fingertips to determine which data will help the most. You never know what new insights you’ll discover!
Customizing metrics is not all that different from dimension customization.
Instead of clicking on Dimensions, this time select Metrics.
From here, you can add and remove metrics that suit your needs. For a UA-style landing page report, make sure to choose the following metrics:
Sessions
New Users
Engagement Rate
Average Engagement Time
Event Count
Conversions
Create a New Summary Card
Summary cards are a great way to take a fast scan of your analytics when checking reports.
While they won’t show you everything, summary cards can help you streamline your review of the information you find most important.
To create a new summary card, simply click on Create a New Card. From there, you can customize the card to choose specific dimensions, metrics, and visualization style.
Save Your New Template
The key here is not to overwrite your other template that you used to get started. Instead, save your work as a New Report.
Make a Shortcut to Your Report
Remember, our intention is to make pulling GA4 landing page reports as quick and easy as possible.
That’s why I would recommend creating a shortcut for you to access this with just a couple of clicks going forward.
First, click on Reports.
Next, click on Library. There should be a folder icon next to the word.
Unless you’ve already created some collections, you should only see two collections. In the collection marked Life Cycle, click where it says Edit Collection.
A prompt on the left will ask you to drag reports to create collection. Find your report template and drag it into the topic labeled Acquisition.
That’s it!
Now when you click on the Reports icon on the main menu, you can pull your latest landing page report with ease. Simply click the drop-down menus for Life Cycle and Acquisition, where you will find the template that we’ve been putting together.
Best Practices For Landing Page Reporting
The whole point of this practice is to understand what customers are driven towards and how we can improve our content to bring in more traffic.
When you run your GA4 landing page report, be on the lookout for pages that have a low number of visits, or worse, poor engagement. These are areas of growth for your brand.
Take advantage of landing pages that are doing well. Any time a landing page has a high click rate and engagement, you should be looking for ways to capitalize on that momentum.
Add more links to that page that direct users to more of your articles. Use those pages to advertise upcoming promotions. If at all possible, recreate that style of writing in new content.
Conclusion
Google Analytics 4 is a powerhouse of reporting. In the right hands, GA4 can revolutionize your marketing and content strategies.
Don’t wait until UA finally kicks the bucket for good in 2023. Learn about GA4 now to easily generate the reports that matter most. You should consider creating your GA4 tracking ASAP so you have as much data as possible to compare for reporting.
We’re also here to help!
If you need more information on how to best utilize the features of your GA4 landing page report, or if something doesn’t look right, just reach out and my team will get back to you ASAP.
How are you going to use Google Analytics to increase your web traffic? Let me know!
Thomas Morton, an Englishman who traveled to Plymouth Colony in 1622, wasted no time in clashing with his strait-laced Pilgrim neighbors, leading a nearby village called Merrymount of fellow English miscreants and Algonquian Indians.
Dubbed the “Lord of Misrule” by Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford, Morton and his followers affixed antlers to the top of an 80-foot maypole, around which they hosted a festival with dancing and drinking that was no doubt sinful by Puritan standards.
After being banished from the colonies multiple times and traveling back to England, Morton wrote the “New English Canaan” around 1633 about his travails across the pond, a book that offered a scathing critique of the Pilgrims and is widely considered to be the first banned book in America.
Morton returned to the colonies 10 years later, but his reputation preceded him, and Massachusetts leaders exiled him to what would eventually become Maine due to the “mocking accusations Morton had hurled against them in print,” University of Southern California history professor Peter Mancall writes in “The Trials of Thomas Morton.”
While it’s been nearly four centuries since Morton’s magnum opus was banned, the urge to censor has not disappeared in America, and has erupted in K-12 schools during the 21st century.
The American Library Association reports that nearly 1,600 individual books were challenged or removed in libraries and schools in 2021, the highest number since the ALA started tracking bans three decades ago.
“There has been an unprecedented increase in the number of challenges reported,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, told Fox News Digital. “We are receiving multiple challenge reports on a daily basis when we used to maybe get two or three reports a week.”
Most of the challenges in recent years have come from conservative parents who object to LGBTQ content and topics that cover racial issues in a way that they see as divisive.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” – the 1960 Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Harper Lee that has been a staple in high school classrooms for decades – was #7 on ALA’s list of the most banned books as recently as 2020.
The classic American novel was removed from the 9th-grade reading list by a Seattle-area school board earlier this year for its use of the N-word and what some community members see as an antiquated portrayal of racial issues.
In other instances, book bans cut both ways. A school district in Texas temporarily removed 41 books from library shelves last month that were challenged by community members. Among the challenged titles were books with LGBTQ themes like “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” but also “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” and even the Bible.
“Whether you’re liberal or conservative, you need to understand that that that ax swings two ways,” Will Creeley, the legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Fox News Digital. “No matter what your values are, teaching a generation of students to call the proverbial speech police if they encounter ideas they don’t agree with – that’s setting ourselves up for problems down the line.”
Some view this new front of the culture war as a symptom of America’s one-size-fits-all education system, which forces parents to send their kids to certain public schools for seemingly arbitrary reasons like the zip code where they reside, as opposed to the educational values they aspire to.
The implementation of school choice polices, which allows parents to decide how taxpayer funds for their children’s education are spent, would allow families to pick and choose schools that are more closely aligned with their values, according to Neal McCluskey, the Director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.
“It fundamentally changes what the education money does or how it’s allocated. Right now, what happens is people get taxed at the local, state, and federal level and that money goes to public schools, so that if you want to use that money, you have got to use those schools. But that means diverse people are all being pushed into one school, and that’s what leads to conflicts,” McCluskey told Fox News Digital.
“Choice says: Let’s have the money follow kids. A corollary to that is let’s give educators the autonomy to start different schools, run different schools.”
School choice is an umbrella term that refers to the many vehicles for transferring power from state boards to parents. Vouchers allow parents to put public funding that was set aside for their children’s education toward private school tuition. Education savings accounts take things a step further, allowing families to use those funds for anything from tutoring to curriculum used at home.
“What that does is it ends the conflict, at least it ends the need for conflict. Instead of saying you all have to fight to grab the brass ring, it says go seek whatever ring you want, go find a school that is consistent with your values,” McCluskey said.
“Everybody gets to do that, rather than everybody has to be put into an arena to battle for control of a single school.”
While battles over book bans have mostly brewed at the local and state level, First Lady Jill Biden chimed in on the issue last week.
“All books should be in the library. All books,” she told NBC News. “This is America. We don’t ban books.”
Former First Lady Melania Trump had her own brush with challenges to books in 2017, when she sent a collection of 10 Dr. Seuss books to schools around the nation for “National Read a Book Day.”
Liz Phipps Soeiro, a school librarian at Cambridgeport Elementary School in Massachusetts, rejected the books and sent them back to Trump, writing in the Horn Book Blog that her library didn’t need them and that “Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”
Battles over book bans exist along a sliding scale, from a librarian rejecting books, to a school district pulling books challenged by parents, to state legislatures implementing policies outright banning specific titles.
Caldwell-Stone, the head of ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, said that government-mandated censorship is the most concerning category.
“Any individual, any parent has the right and the ability to raise concerns about a school assignment or a book,” she said.
“That’s the First Amendment right to petition a government agency, but we are deeply concerned about efforts by elected officials, governing bodies that are governed by the First Amendment, that are censoring materials based on their viewpoint, or because they deal with a controversial topic in a way that they may not always agree with.”
Best pick of the NFL draft? Class with the biggest 2022 impact? Early picks for Rookie of the Year? Our experts weigh in on the biggest remaining questions.
Article URL: https://www.finleycms.com/careers/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28229152 Points: 1 # Comments: 0 The post Finley (YC W21) is hiring fintech experts to transform debt capital management appeared first on Get Funding For Your Business And Ventures. The post Finley (YC W21) is hiring fintech experts to transform debt capital management appeared first on Buy It At … Continue reading Finley (YC W21) is hiring fintech experts to transform debt capital management
With more than 3.6 billion social media users worldwide, social media marketing cannot be ignored.
Savvy marketers know social media is a vital part of every marketing campaign. For businesses, every social media platform is an opportunity to engage with their target audience.
Even marketing stars know that strategizing and managing even a few social networks can be overwhelming without the right management social media tools in place.
Consider this:
60 percent of company mentions on Twitter occur when you aren’t in the office.
How can you keep up with your Twitter account when you haven’t even checked Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok today? What about all those new social media sites that are popping up every other day (or so it seems)?
How do you know which ones to target for your brand and which to skip?
Take a deep breath.
Managing your social media shouldn’t be overwhelming. Social media tools can help:
Save you time by doing the posting, social listening, and hashtag research for you.
Save you money by allowing you to allocate resources to other tasks.
Maybe even save your brand’s reputation by catching a negative post in time for you to run interference and resolve the issue quickly.
I’ve done the research for you and organized the top social media marketing into five categories. We start with tools that help with the four stages of social media marketing: discovery, creation, monitoring and scheduling, and analyzing. Then, I added a fifth miscellaneous category at the end.
If you find yourself stuck in a particular stage, just head down to the relevant section.
Are you ready to get productive, optimize your social media marketing, and become an expert social media marketer?
Let’s begin.
Content Research and Discovery
According to Statista, users post 347,222 stories to Instagram, and 157,000 share messages on Facebook every minute. It can be overwhelming to find value-added content in all that noise.
Let’s look at content curation social media tools that help filter meaningful content so you can find images, posts, and conversations that will resonate with your audience.
This tool organizes stories shared by friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook, and other social apps. It’s available as a web, Android, and iOS app.
It displays aggregated stories from your social media circle as easy-to-read links in a feed. You can also add influencers in your niche.
You can catch up on news from the last hour, or go through the past week using the “Sort By” option. You can tap into content shared by your second-degree connections, as well.
Finally, you can also curate content from your newsfeed into an email newsletter.
Feedly aggregates the top content in your niche from industry blogs and other publications. Their AI bot, Leo, acts as a research assistant that learns your reading habits and delivers articles you’ll be interested in.
It then “reads” each article and annotates them with relevant summaries, analyses, and links to relevant content.
Leo learns from your behavior. If you save an article, it will show you more like it. If you click “less like this,” Leo will remember and show you fewer articles on that topic.
You can also set up priorities within topics. Choose a sub-topic, and Leo will include those articles under a Priorities tab.
There are several reasons I love this tool. On top of content discovery, you can use it to research keywords, track online trends, and even find influencers within your vertical.
Use it to dissect your competition, understand your audience, and find content with the most social network shares.
The Chrome extension lets you do your research while you browse, as well. To use it, enter your keyword or phrase to discover the top-performing content.
You can use the filters to customize your search by language, time frame, country, and a number of other parameters.
You can find the popularity of content on a particular social network by using the “sort by” feature.
You can also plug a blog URL into the tool to find its top-performing content pieces.
According to Venngage, 49 percent of surveyed marketers rated visual content as very important, but 43 percent said producing it consistently was their biggest challenge.
Social media has become undeniably visual, and having a presence on Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and other visual platforms is paramount.
Here are a couple of social media tools to help you create videos, images, diagrams, Pinterest boards, infographics, and more.
This is a simple graphic design web tool with pre-made templates for all kinds of social networks and uses.
It combines some of the best elements of Photoshop with a drag-and-drop functionality.
For every template, there are a variety of layouts, fonts, and backgrounds to choose from. And if you find yourself having trouble with a particular functionality, there are free tutorials to help you design better graphics.
For example, if you’re considering repurposing your most shared content for an infographic, there’s a tutorial for creating simple infographics with Canva.
Here are ten websites to source free and premium stock photos you can use in your designs.
Biteable allows you to create videos, animations, motion graphics, and a number of other visuals for social, ads, and even presentations. You can use any of their templates to get started.
You can sync your marketing calendar with theirs to get tips and ready-to-go video templates for relevant seasons, holidays, and events.
Pixlr is a freemium service with a lot of the functionality of Photoshop.
Its free services include Pixlr X (for express) with essential tools for quick editing. Pixlr E (for editor) offers a more extensive selection of tools for more sophisticated content creation and Remove BG, an AI-based background removal tool.
If you need even more photo editing capabilities, they offer a subscription-based plan that includes more stickers, overlays, and visual effects, as well.
Pixlr offers templates, as well, some free and some part of the subscription service.
Pro Tip: One-Pixel Pinterest Image
The images you share on Pinterest should be vertically aligned. But, if you insert a tall image directly into a blog post, it’ll take up a lot of real estate.
The solution is uploading the tall Pinterest image below the first picture of your post. Then, change its height and width to one pixel each.
Now, the image will appear when you click on the “Pin it” button to share on Pinterest. The alt text of the Pinterest image automatically serves as the caption for the image.
Monitoring and Scheduling
It’s impossible to manage your brand’s social media accounts 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But the world of social media doesn’t turn off at 5 p.m.
Social media tools for monitoring and scheduling can help. They can save you hours every week by combining your brand activity from multiple social media networks into one dashboard.
8. Hootsuite
Hoot is a full-service social media management tool that lets you track mentions, engagement, and other metrics across all of your social platforms. You can schedule and track posts using their analytics tools and respond to mentions via your dashboard.
Hopper HQ connects your brand with top content creators in your vertical. Once you choose from a list of recommended creators, they deliver content you can share in posts and paid ads.
CoSchedule is a simple, integrated social media and blog publishing calendar.
It also includes a suite of organizing tools for social media, brand assets, work, and content. Schedule your blog posts, collaborate with different authors on a post, and assign specific tasks to different people.
It has an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface, as well.
In the calendar view itself, you can also keep track of the most shared and engaged with content.
If This Then That is a fantastic social media tool to connect applications and automate social actions. IFTTT offers a series of applets that allow you to connect platforms and streamline your work.
For example, you can send your Instagrams to Twitter as native tweets. You can also get a weekly notification email of all of the people who followed you on Twitter. You can also archive tweets to a Google spreadsheet.
You can create your own applet from scratch by choosing a trigger and appending an action to it.
Or, you can use applets created by other people.
In this article, Kristi Hines explains a killer recipe to directly schedule social media updates from your Feedly account.
You can schedule the articles you choose to read later in Feedly on your social network accounts through Buffer. You only need Gmail and Buffer accounts to set up this applet.
Social Media Analytics
The best way to find the most effective social network for your business is by tracking your social media marketing efforts.
The right data allows you to calculate ROI from your social media marketing campaigns. It’ll help you find your top-performing content, so you can tweak your campaign and optimize your marketing efforts.
Let’s look at a few social media tools to measure and analyze your social activities.
Google Analytics is one of the most widely used analytics tools to track user behavior on websites. But, you can also track social reports under its reporting tab.
To access your social network standing, log into your Analytics account. Then, head over to the Reporting tab. Click on Acquisition > Social.
Set up goals inside Analytics to access these social reports. There are standard templates inside analytics you can use to set actionable goals for your social media marketing campaigns.
There are eight reports you can see under social analytics–Overview, Network Referral, Data Hub Activity, Landing Pages, Trackbacks, Conversions, Plugins, and Visitors Flow.
Once you set up goals, you’ll be able to see your social media impact in Overview.
The most important report is conversions.
You can break down your social media campaign by network and find out the most successful platform.
If you’re interested in the user behavior–the like and share buttons your visitors are clicking–you’ll need to set up social plugins.
Although setting up this report might take time, the end results are worth the effort:
A clear picture of the social network that provides the best ROI and the kind of content you should create for it.
HubSpot has a number of tools, from marketing automation to a full content management system. Their Marketing Hub allows you to create and manage social media posts, video for social, and conversations from their platform.
Olapic is a great tool to add to your visual marketing arsenal. You can use the tool to discover, curate, and schedule user-generated content across Instagram, Pinterest, and all your other social accounts.
Use it on your site, in your social ads, and in your emails to lift engagement and increase conversions.
Not only does Semrush allow you to create, schedule, and track your own posts, it also lets you track and analyze your competitors’ posts, too. You can also use it to optimize your social ads.
SEMRush is also helpful for general keyword and content research in your vertical (or you can also use Ubersuggest for this).
Miscellaneous Tools To Increase Social Engagement on Your Website
You are already equipped with the best social media tools to research, curate, plan, schedule, monitor, and analyze your social media marketing efforts.
What about social engagement on your website? The end goal of most social campaigns is to increase your website’s engagement and traffic.
Here are some tools to power your website and drive social media interaction.
A simple way to increase the number of tweets on your blog post is by adding a link to every actionable comment. When a reader clicks on the link, it automatically adds a tweet to their Twitter account.
You can track all of your embedded links from the dashboard.
You can also analyze their performance using their analytics tool.
If you’re on WordPress, there is a simpler alternative–Better Click to Tweet plugin.
Floating share buttons can either help or hurt your engagement and conversions, according to BigCommerce. For example, sharing buttons with counters can hurt conversions if the number of shares is low, while adding share buttons to product pages can actually distract users.
The best way to find out when and where to use share buttons is through extensive testing.
If you’re on WordPress, you can start with Share Buttons by AddToAny plugin. It has the option to activate share buttons in the sidebar, as well as above and below every content piece.
You can also customize the number of social networks you want to show your visitors, from the ones below.
Influencers are a trusted source of information for your customers. A recommendation from them can lift your product sales and brand visibility.
But, how can you find influencers interested in your post, service, or product?
That’s where Onalytica comes in. It finds relevant influencers for your brand based on your article link or uploaded file.
It scans an article, then generates a list of targeted influencers in under a minute. After reverse-engineering relevant influencers, you can connect and start building a relationship.
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is a great tool to ensure headlines attract attention—and clicks.
Using it is simple:
Head over to www.coschedule.com/headline-analyzer.
Plug your headline in the “Type your headline here” bar.
Press the “Analyze Now” button.
You’ll get an overall score for your headline and a grade for the variety of words you’ve used, top keywords in your headline, and the sentiment your headline evokes
If a large section of your audience hangs out on Facebook, then activating Facebook Comments on your website can increase engagement and bring you closer to your social media marketing goals.
But, beware. There is a risk of comment scams that easily pass spam filters. You’ll need to stay on top of comment moderation.
Conclusion
Social media can become a huge distraction, even if it does help drive your business. Manually logging in to post blogs and business updates can eat up valuable time you could use to build a new product, take care of vendor orders, or handle customer concerns.
Start incorporating the above tools in your armory to automate repetitive tasks and batch your social media posts.
They’ll save you time every week. They’ll also improve your ROI from social media marketing and your bottom line.
Have I missed any of your favorite social media marketing tools? Can you share your social media productivity secrets? Please let me know in the comments below.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRejectRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
