The twenty Best Fresh Social Media Contraptions to Attempt in two thousand seventeen (And How to Use Them) – The Buffer Blog
The twenty Best Fresh Social Media Contraptions to Attempt in two thousand seventeen (And How to Use Them)
Nov 16, two thousand sixteen Last updated: Aug 14, two thousand seventeen Nineteen minutes to read
The social media world is a fascinating one.
Every so often, a fresh social media platform emerges to capture our attention (Peach) or become part of our daily lives (Snapchat).
The social media contraptions landscape can be just as fascinating – and sturdy!
Every week, people build and launch fresh social media contraptions, empowering us marketers in our day-to-day work. To give you a sense of how amazing the landscape is, here’s a graphic of some of the social media implements available: social media management, listening, analyzing, content creation, and more. And here’s the even crazier part: The graphic (from Friend Media) is four years old. Imagine how jam-packed it’d be today!
With all these contraptions to choose from, how can you stay on top of the latest and greatest?
As part of our State of Social Media two thousand sixteen campaign, we’ve scoured Product Hunt for the latest trending social media contraptions and created a list of twenty one products for marketers and teams to attempt in 2017.
Keep reading to see the utter list, or click over to the Product Hunt collection with all of 2017’s best social media implements.
20 Best Fresh Social Media Contraptions to Attempt in 2017
To make it lighter to find the instruments that are most helpful to you, here’s a look at all we’ll cover in this post. Feel free to leap to any that catch your eye!
We’ve also added these instruments to a Product Hunt collection for effortless browsing and bookmarking. Feel free to check it out there to see the conversation about each of these excellent contraptions.
1. Quuu
Hand-curated content suggestions for social media sharing
Best used for: Content curation
Description: Quuu and its amazing community (of real people, not computers) hand-curate content for you and pack your Buffer queue, making content curation super effortless.
All you have to do is connect Quuu to your Buffer account and select any interest categories that are relevant to you and your audience.
Quuu will send hand-curated content right into your Buffer queue, at whatever frequency you choose. You can then go into Buffer to by hand edit the suggestions if you choose.
At the moment, they curate content in more than three hundred different topics. To give you a petite taste, here are all the categories they curate that begin with the letter “B”:
- Ballet
- Baseball
- Basketball
- Bass Fishing
- Beach Lifestyle
- Beer
- Big Data
- Bitcoin and the Blockchain
- Blogging Tips
- Board Games
- Boating/Yachting
- Brain Health
- Branding
- Business Analytics
- Business Management
- Business Networking
- Business Strategy
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
Two. Panda Five
A wise news reader, powered by integrations
(If you subscribe now, there’s a 40% discount until their beta completes.)
Best used for: Content curation
Description: Panda five (the fifth iteration of the popular news-reading app) helps you speed up your content curation process by permitting you to browse numerous websites at once, integrate with other websites, and pull in RSS feeds of your beloved content.
Once you authorize Panda with your Twitter account, it will recommend you a list of feeds to go after based on who you go after on Twitter. You can also search for more feeds and add them to your reader.
To save you more time, you can even read articles in the app itself.
One cool feature of Panda is that it comes pre-built with integrated feeds for a number of popular sites, both blogs and media collections. Here’s a quick look at a few:
Bonus: If you are using its Chrome extension, you can personalize your fresh tab with nine different options such as a to-do list or a notepad (with more coming soon).
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
Trio. Zest
Fresh marketing inspiration with every fresh tab
Best used for: Content curation
Description: Zest is a fresh tab extension that helps you detect excellent marketing articles. All the articles are curated by its community of marketers and by hand approved.
Simply add the Chrome extension, and whenever you open a fresh tab, Zest will serve you the latest curated marketing articles.
You can customize your feed by selecting the tags that are most relevant to you. There are presently twenty nine different tags (or topics) you can choose from. Here are the top ten tags with the most number of approved articles:
Bonus: Apart from receiving this content suggestions, you can also suggest your content or excellent content you have found. The team at Zest is working on a Zest profile, which will permit people to go after your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Zest posts. Soon, you will be able to build up your online marketing identity with Zest, based on your social media posts and Zest contributions.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
Four. Yotpo – Curation
Collect Instagram photos from customers and influencers
Price: $299 onwards (for the entire user-generated content marketing platform)
Best used for: Content curation for Instagram
Description: Yotpo makes collecting the best user-generated content and making total use of them for your business truly effortless. Curation is their latest feature to help you collect and use user-generated Instagram photos (with decent permissions).
There are several ways you can use Yotpo’s curation feature.
- With their advanced search functions, you can create a feed of Instagram photos from your customers, influencers and yourself.
- Using their automated workflow, you can lightly get the permission to use those photos and thank the creators. Getting permission is an significant step for staying in compliance with Instagram’s terms and also doing right by the original creators.
- After collecting the user-generated photos, you can create a shoppable Instagram feed and photo galleries where your customers can go directly from Instagram or your homepage to the product page to accomplish the purchase.
- You can also promote your curated photos on your website, social media, or Yotpo Ads to showcase how real customers are using your product.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
Five. Refind
The home for the best links on the web
Best used for: Content curation
Description: Refind helps you re-discover the links you have previously saved when you actually need them. Refind can also display you what your friends have saved if you choose.
With Refind’s extension, you can save any links by simply clicking the extension button. Then, you can add a tag or choose from the recommendations. It also shows you how many people had saved the link to give you a sense of the popularity and quality of the link.
Apart from searching for the article in your Refind feed, Refind helps you rediscover them. For example, when you are searching on a particular topic on Google, Refind will highlight the relevant links you have previously saved in the search results.
With Refind, there are three ways to detect or re-discover content:
- Links you previously saved
- Links saved by your friends
- Recommendations based on your saved links
If you tend to find and read articles on the go, Refind also has iOS and Android apps too!
Bonus: For the articles that you intend to read soon but not right now, you can use Refind’s “Read Soon” feature. When you are saving a link with the browser extension, simply hit the “Read Soon” option as well. Refind’s recommendation is to save articles you would actually want to read within the next two weeks. The idea is that this adds intention and immediacy so we will actually read these articles.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
From our latest State of Social Media survey, we found that 83% of marketers would like to create more movie content if there were no obstacles like time, resources, and budget. The following are a few movie creation devices to help you with that — some of them are free!
6. Adobe Spark
Movies, photos and stories made in minutes
Best used for: Content creation
Description: With Adobe Spark, you can create beautiful graphics, web stories, and animated movies in minutes.
Through Adobe Spark’s browser editor, you can create and edit social graphics, web stories, and movies.
- For graphics, you can resize the graphic for different social media platform and switch the theme, color palette, background, and text. (Quick peak: Share the graphic on Facebook or Twitter once and the watermark will be eliminated.)
- A web story is essentially a web page with photos, movies, and text that tells a story. Here’s a indeed cool example. When creating a web story, you can include photos, text, button, movies and more.
- For movies, you can pick from a story template or commence from scrape. You can then insert icons, texts, and photos, add music and switch the layout of each slide.
Templates are provided so that you don’t always have to commence from scrape. For example, if you are making a movie, here are the story templates you can choose from:
- Promote an idea
- Tell what happened
- A hero’s journey
- Display and tell
- Private growth
- Train a lesson
- An invitation
Bonus: Adobe has created iOS apps (Adobe Spark Post, Page, and Movie) so that you can create these content on the go!
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
7. Rocketium
Convert text & media into stunning movies
Price: Free, $33/month, $39/month, or $125/month
Best used for: Brief movie creation
Description: Rocketium concentrates on creating brief movies with overlaid text (think Buzzfeed’s Tasty movies!).
Using Rocketium’s browser editor, you can create brief movies in three elementary steps.
- Add content and captions to the editor. You can upload pics and movies or select copyright-free pictures and movies from their gallery.
- Choose a theme for your movie. You can pick from their pre-made themes or build your own.
- Customize your movie with filters, animations, fonts and more.
Here’s what makes Rocketium so wonderful: You can choose to publish in different aspect ratios (portrait, landscape, and square) and Rocketium will automatically resize your captions for you! There’s no need to go through the usual process of re-making the entire movie into a square or a vertical version.
Check out a cool example from the Rocketium team here.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
8. Pixabay Two.0
Over 780,000 free high-quality photos and movies
Best used for: Finding photos and movies for your content
Description: Pixabay has more than 790,000 free photos, illustrations, vectors, and movies for your use. The Pixabay community contributes more than one thousand fresh original high-resolution pictures and movies every day!
With Pixabay, you can find pics, graphics, movies and more for your social media or blog posts. All the resources are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0, which means you can loosely use them for any purpose (with a few exceptions).
If you are like me — often not sure what term to search for, you can browse the resources by category. Here’s a list of the categories on Pixabay:
- Animals
- Architecture/Buildings
- Backgrounds/Textures
- Beauty/Style
- Business/Finance
- Computer/Communication
- Education
- Emotions
- Food/Drink
- Health/Medical
- Industry/Craft
- Music
- Nature/Landscapes
- People
- Places/Monuments
- Religion
- Science/Technology
- Sports
- Transportation/Traffic
- Travel/Vacation
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
9. gifs
Create personalized GIFs in your browser
Best used for: Creating custom-made GIFs or turning your movies into GIFS
Description: gifs permits you to take any movie (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) and live movie (Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Periscope, Twitch, etc.) and quickly turn it into a GIF using its web application.
To begin creating a GIF, you can copy and paste the URL, upload it as a file or even search for one on gifs.com. The browser editor gives you the options of cropping the movie or GIF, adding caption and stickers, and applying effects. You can even do frame-by-frame edits to create more detailed GIFs!
With its one-click meme feature, you can turn a movie or a gif into your dearest meme in a blink of an eye. Simply select the meme and gifs.com will add the captions and effects for you. At the moment, only the “Deal With It” meme is available.
Here’s one that I created:
Bonus: You can set where the GIF links back to. When your GIF takes off on the internet, you could build up traffic to your site or followers for your social media profiles.
Here’s what a Product Hunter (PH founder Ryan Hoover in fact) has to say:
Ten. CalendarX
Get a calendar your audience can go after
Price: $7/month, $29/month, or $72/month (with a 30-day trial)
Best used for: Live events promotion
Description: CalendarX is a calendar your followers can go after – how meta! Once they go after your calendar, you can thrust significant events to their individual calendar.
In terms of creating events, CalendarX works fairly similarly to most calendars. Events you created can be shoved to your followers’ private calendar so that they will always be up to date about your events. This can be handy for live events such as Twitter talks or Facebook Live events.
CalendarX provides statistics such as the number of followers, the number of calendar page views and more.
To help you build up followers, there are many ways you can share your CalendarX calendar:
- Share a link to the calendar page or the go after page
- Add a go after button on your website or emails
- Embed it on your website
Furthermore, CalendarX permits you collect information from your followers when they subscribe to your calendar, just like a mailing list signup form.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
11. Rebrandly
Create and share links with your custom-built domain name
Price: Free or $99/month with advanced analytics
Best used for: Social media branding
Description: Rebrandly is a custom-made URL shortener for sharing branded links. You can turn long, elaborate URL into branded and memorable ones.
How to use it: After you create your account, you would want to set up a custom-made domain for your branding. You can either register for a fresh custom-made domain through Rebrandly or use a spare domain if you have one. For example, I could go with links.alfredlua.com.
Download the browser extension to quickly rebrand any links. When you are at a page you would like to share, hit the browser extension button and you will be able to rebrand the link. For example, I could rebrand my LinkedIn profile as links.alfredlua.com/cv.
If you choose to organize your Rebrandly shortened links in the existing apps you are using already, Rebrandly integrates with several other link-shortening apps such as:
Bonus: Derric from Rebrandly was very kind to suggest coupons for a free domain. If you use the coupon “buffer”, you can get your very first domain with .link, .click, .xyz, .press, .site, .space, or .tech for free.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
12. Yala
A bot that knows the best time to share your content
Best used for: Social media scheduling
Description: Yala is a Slack bot that uses machine learning to determine the best time to post to Twitter and Facebook.
Embark by adding Yala to your Slack team (or reach out to your team admin about adding her to your Slack team). Once Yala is added, she will reach out to you via a direct message in Slack or you could say hi to her (@yala) to begin scheduling.
After you authorize Yala to post on your Twitter and/or Facebook profile, there are several things you can do:
- Switch the publishing frequency (Yala will inform you your optimal posting times)
- Schedule a text post or an photo with text
- Check your scheduled posts by sending “series” to Yala (Series is your queue of scheduled posts)
Yala uses machine learning to update your optimal posting times automatically so you don’t have to think about the posting times at all!
Bonus: The team is exploring the idea of bringing Yala to Facebook Messenger so you will be able to use it even if you are not using Slack.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
13. PostReach
The easiest way to measure content spectacle
Price: $Ten/month or $29/month (with 21-day free trial)
Best used for: Content marketing analysis
Description: PostReach automates content reporting for you. It tells you your key traffic stats, the number of shares and the influencers who collective your content. With 84% of social media marketers also working on content marketing, PostReach can help you with your social media and content marketing reports.
(PostReach is a project from Buffer’s Ash Read and friends.)
How to use it: With just one click, you can setup Postreach for your blog and it will automatically create reports for every post you publish.
With PostReach, you get the following information:
- Traffic breakdown: Views and unique views
- Reader engagement: Bounce rate and average time on page
- Reader acquisition: Channels and sources which brought readers to your content
- Shares breakdown: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest
- Twitter breakdown: Total shares, tweets, retweets, and total potential reach
- Influencers: Influencers who collective your content and their social stats
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
14. Expose
Manage your Facebook & Instagram ad campaigns from Slack
Price: Free (at the moment for its beta)
Best used for: Paid social media management
Description: Expose is a Slack bot that brings you your Facebook and Instagram metrics and permits you to manage your ad campaigns from within Slack. It also alerts you when there are significant switches to your ads’ Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Cost-Per-Click (CPC) so that you can react to them instantly. With 91% of marketers in our latest survey telling that they are investing in Facebook ads, Expose could be a fine instrument to stay on top of all the ad campaigns.
To use Expose, add the slack bot to your Slack team (or reach out to your team admin about adding this to your Slack team). Once you have done that, the Expose Slack bot will reach out to you in Slack to help you with the setup. You can see the results of your ad campaigns and manage them from Slack.
You can also set up alerts via the website to notify you of any significant switches to your ad campaigns’ metrics.
With Expose, you get all these right within Slack:
- Total overview of your Facebook ads account
- Details of each campaign, ad set, and ad (including impressions, reach, amount spent, purchase value and CTR)
- Daily, weekly, and monthly report of your ad spectacle
- Money-saving alerts when your CPC or conversion rate switches significantly
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
15. Ghost Browser
The Productivity Browser for Technology Professionals
Price: Free or up to $8.33 per user per month
Best used for: Social media management of numerous accounts
Description: Ghost Browser permits you to log into any website with numerous accounts from one window. This can be very handy when you manage numerous social media profiles for each of the social media platforms.
After you request for a beta invite, the team at Ghost Browser will send you a link to download the browser. Download, log in and you are ready to roll!
It looks almost like Google Chrome so if you are familiar with Google Chrome, it will be effortless to get the dangle of it.
Here’s how you can use Ghost Browser to manage numerous profiles of the same social media platform (such as your individual and business profiles) using just one window:
- Right click on a tab and select “Fresh Group”. A fresh tab with a different color will be opened. Each group acts like a fresh window, which means you can log in to a different profile of the same social media platform for every group you open.
- Clicking on the Ghost Browser icon beside the address bar permits you to quickly switch inbetween different groups and tabs.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
16. Engage by Twitter
Grow and understand your Twitter audiences on-the-go
Best used for: Social media listening and engagement
Description: Engage is a standalone app by Twitter to help you manage your Twitter profiles. It permits you to connect with influencers by highlighting significant mentions and provides you with more data about your profile and tweets.
In the app, there are three main tabs in the navigation – Engage, Understand, and Posts.
- Under “Engage”, you can check out top notifications, mentions, and interactions with verified Twitter profiles.
- Under “Understand”, you can see metrics for your profile such as the number of likes, retweets and goes after.
- Under “Posts”, you can dig into the spectacle of individual tweets.
Here’s what Engage looks like from the Product Hunt’s Twitter profile:
Learn how to use Engage from Twitter here.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
17. Snaplytics
Analytics platform for Snapchat
Price: $179 or $299 for the brand’s analytics and $Ten/day for each active influencer for the influencers’ analytics
Description: Analytics for Snapchat is very much needed by marketers and influencers since Snapchat does not provide it natively. Snaplytics provides you with all the metrics so that you do not have to collect them by hand again. Apart from that, if your brand works with influencers, the platform permits you to track how well the influencers’ snaps are performing.
After connecting your account with Snaplytics, it displays all your metrics in a neat dashboard. You can check out how well each snap is performing, your follower growth, and overall metrics.
Through Snaplytics, you can find out:
- The number of opens, screenshots, completion rate, and open rate for each story
- Estimated total followers and follower growth
- Your average stats such as the average number of opens and the average number of screenshots per story
Here’s a demo if you wish to check out the platform.
Bonus: Snaplytics provides a TalentScout service to help you find the right Snapchat influencers for your brand.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
Legal. Intellifluence
Intelligent Influencer Marketing
Price: $9/month (with a 14-day free trial) or Entreprise plan
Best used for: Influencer marketing
Description: Intellifluence helps you detect and collaborate with the right influencers for your brand. What makes Intellifluence stand out from other influencer marketing platforms and agencies is that it concentrates on key peer level influencers instead of the big names. This makes influencer marketing more viable for small-medium businesses.
With Intellifluence, you can search for influencers by country, social network, and keywords. Through the system, you can send a pitch for collaboration to your selected influencers and manage your communications with them.
The influencers signed up to be in the system themselves which meant that they are likely to be looking for collaborations. They are also verified by the Intellifluence team. Apart from social media, Intellifluence’s system also includes influencers on other platforms. Here’s the total list:
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
Nineteen. Waaffle
Aggregate, analyze, and publish content from social media
Best used for: Social media monitoring, curation, and analysis
Description: Waaffle is the instrument for making the most of your social media content. With Waaffle, you can aggregate and monitor social media posts from Twitter and Instagram, analyze them and publish the aggregated content.
After connecting your Twitter and/or Instagram account, you can create feeds for specific hashtags or accounts. From there, there are three different ways you can use the feeds:
- Monitor and react to the relevant posts to engage with your audience
- Analyze the number of posts using the hashtags or from the accounts and view the top five posts in the past thirty days
- Display your selected social media posts on a public Waaffle board, a website widget, or a utter customizable feed using its API
The curated public feed of social media posts is good for many purposes. Here are some recommendations from the team:
- Aggregated social campaigns
- Competitions
- Live events
- Website social feeds
- Custom-built social presence
- Shoppable social content
Feel free to check out my test Waaffle board here or a much better actual example here!
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
20. Falcon.io
The social media and customer practice management platform
Price: Pro and Premium plans (pricing not available)
Best used for: Total marketing and customer practice management
Description: Falcon.io is the one device that helps you with almost all of your marketing efforts. The platform permits you to listen on social, engage with your customers, manage and publish your content, build responsive pages, measure your spectacle across channels and more! On top of all that, it is also a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) instrument.
Falcon.io simplifies customer practice management into six key areas, and you can manage all that with its platform:
- Listen: Monitor social media channels and online media to collect insights
- Publish: Plan and publish with a social media content calendar
- Measure: Make informed decisions with social media analytics
- Engage: Manage all your customer engagement needs with your social inbox
- Build: Create beautiful and responsive campaign pages
- Audience: Connect all your customer data in enriched profiles
Since it’s such a powerful instrument with numerous superb features, it might be fine to request a demo from the team to better understand the product. You can request a demo here.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
Bonus: Buffer Reply
Social customer service software for support teams
From our State of Social Media survey, we found that only one in five uses social media for customer support. With more customers turning to social media channels for support issues, there’s a good chance here to stand out from other businesses. We thought it might be helpful to share the device which we use at Buffer for social media customer support. It’s none other than… Buffer Reply!
We launched Buffer Reply earlier this year and the team has been working hard to improve the product. I’m excited to share that Buffer Reply, a downright redesigned version of the implement, is leisurely being flipped out to customers at the moment.
Price: Commencing at $49/month for puny teams and basic features (Custom-made pricing is available for larger teams and advanced features.)
Best used for: Social media customer support
Description: Buffer Reply is a team inbox for your social customer conversations. It puts all your Twitter and Facebook mentions, direct messages and searches into one elementary inbox so that you and your team can quickly react to your customers and resolve their issues.
Once you connect your account and set up your searches, you are ready to support your customers on Twitter and Facebook.
While most social media devices are built for marketing and engagement, Buffer Reply is built mainly for customer support. With your customers and your support team in mind, here are some of the cool benefits of Buffer Reply:
- You can use filters to bypass the chatter of social media and surface support-related conversations to help your customers quickly.
- You get the things you need to know about your customers to help them, including their profile and your past conversations with them.
- You can work effectively as a team by assigning conversations to the right person and leaving internal notes.
- You can make the best decision for your team through the powerful analytics and reporting.
Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:
Your turn: What are your dearest fresh contraptions?
Thanks for making all the way to the end of the post! I hope you have found one or two (or twenty) fresh implements to add to your daily workflow.
Are there any fresh social media devices I might have missed out? (I most likely have missed fairly a few.) I’m nosey to hear about your shiny fresh contraptions too! Feel free to comment below and I’ll be excited to check them out. Thank you!
