About: Leaf is a Chrome extension that allows you to access detailed and precise analytics from Twitter profiles that interests you – be it your followers, influencers, competitors or even just your own profile directly from the Twitter or Tweetdeck page.
Users: From social media marketers to social bloggers, managers to researchers, smaller businesses, agencies or enterprises – there are no restrictions attached to the users of Leaf.
Cost of Application: While you need to subscribe to Leaf to get an invitation for usage, Leaf is a still free tool. Yay!
Twitter Profile Analysis
Leaf by Anctu is one of its kind, having no competition by far. There are many tools that help you schedule tweets or search for tweets, but reviewing a user profile in just a click, Leaf has created the benchmark! This tool to analyze twitter profile allows you to get insights on anyone without leaving their Twitter or Tweetdeck profile. It provides you with a set of metrics for each Twitter user that you can analyze such as tweets per day, social influence, engagement and so on. We had the opportunity to speak to Marko Pavlovic who shared a bit on what makes Leaf special.
Stay Updated
One of the key benefits as shared by Pavlovic is for you to stay updated with your competitors, followers, influencers and community. It provides you with an insight into the flow of activities in the profile of the user you are interested in.
Google Chrome Extension
The Leaf tab is an extension on Chrome that allows you to analyze your personal Twitter profile that you are on. A drop down box also shows a list of profiles you have reviewed recently.
A flashy Leaf tab that tells you about your recent Leafs!
Twitter Profile Extension
Alternatively, you can click on the Leaf button that appears user profiles which enables you to view the analysis according to different factors.
The Leaf tab that gives you all that you need to know.
The User Interface
Leaf (0.6 Beta) comes with a fairly simple user base which is as easy as the click of a button. Once you register as a user, you get a leaf tab for your Google Chrome browser followed by a leaf tab on every Twitter user profile. We love this tool to analyze Twitter profiles because all you need is just one click for a user to be enthralled with a simple yet detailed analysis of the profile he/she is viewing.
Basic Features:
A shiny leaf button on every Twitter account you view that triggers stunning analytics, even on Tweetdeck.
A set of metrics for each Twitter profile you wish analyze such as tweets per day, social influence, Klout score, a quick overview of topics discussed, recent mentions, top influencers, most engaging tweets and more.
Access to a powerful social media dashboard where you can manage and track your Facebook, Twitter and other networks.
Quick Summary Of Twitter Profile
Weekly Forecast Of Retweet Engagement
Topics Recently Discussed
With the multitude of benefits rendered by Leaf, it does not come as a surprise that it has found bundles of user invites awaiting its approval as you read this. Pavlovic has also shared that Leaf will be extended to other social media platform giants such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Thus, no point in wasting precious time and money on reviewing a Twitter or a Tweetdeck profile with another application. We are sold on Leaf as the go-to tool to analyze twitter profiles!
So you have just come across this article but you\’re running late for a meeting. What should you do? Well, save it for later in your Pocket.
Confused?
Let me introduce to you yet another creation of social media which is known to be obsessed with making things easy for its users: the Pocket app. Formerly known as literally – Read It Later, Pocket allows its users to save any link, video, photo into a convenient format to be viewed later.
The Pocket App
Website: https://getpocket.com
What it really is: A read it later app that allows you to save web links, photos and videos in a convenient format which can be viewed at leisure.
Benefits who?: Anybody from a student to a fashionista, a brand manager, content marketer to a blog builder. It allows you to Pocket your favorite links/ videos/ photos, in a neat grid or list like fashion which can be viewed even without the internet, clean from all the other ads and likes that a web site page usually unloads to the browser. Perfect for commutes, travels, etc.
Price you pay: The app formerly known as \’READ IT LATER\’ shed its price tag of $3 and is now available for free across all platforms.
Pocket saves EVERYTHING!
Highlighted Features
Whether you’re browsing online or on-the-go with your favourite apps, Pocket lets you save great content wherever you find it.
Offline Mode: All the content that you save in the app can be viewed even when you are offline.
Access across Multiple Devices: Once the app is downloaded (which is of course, free), you can view all content saved on any device. So if it’s in Pocket, it’s on your phone, tablet or computer.
Layout: Read/watch what you save in a neat grid or list theme at leisure. Don’t lose track of the interesting things you find online by emailing yourself links or letting tabs pile up in your browser. Just save them to Pocket.
Filter Content: The ability to filter by content type; you can sort by image, video, and traditional text. Filtering by video reveals a grid of thumbnails of videos you\’ve saved across Vimeo, YouTube, and other services.
Categorize Content: The saved items can be categorized based on interests and priorities in the form of tags. They can be Favorited and starred giving you a personalized experience.
Sharing Content: You could also send the content you love to another friend’s Pocket, or share it to Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, or Email.
Hassle-free Viewing Experience
It’s All About Convenience
Pocket (formerly known as Read it Later) was founded in 2007 by Nate Weiner. The world\’s leading save-for-later service currently has more than 10 million registered users and is integrated into more than 500 apps including Flipboard, Twitter and Zite. It is available for major devices and platforms including iPad, iPhone, Android, Mac, Kindle Fire, Kobo, Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Windows.
Nate Weiner – The man behind the App
What hasn’t changed is our focus. Read It Later was a simple tool that focused on doing just one thing: saving things for later. Pocket is about taking all of the core parts of what people did with Read It Later and making them better, easier, and quite honestly, just a lot more fun to use,said Nate Weiner when asked how the app Read It Later developed into Pocket.
It’s an elegant idea that offers readers a respite from the increasingly cluttered web by displaying content stripped of the usual clutter of navigation, buttons, sidebars (and notably, ads). Now dubbed Pocket, the app expands beyond just text and web pages by now offering video and image support. Also notable is the price: Pocket is now free! The app offers a complete design overhaul across all supported devices.
Easy Set-up
Once the free pocket App is downloaded, the simple user interface makes it easy for its users to make the most of it. The desired articles, videos, photos can all be saved through a simple \’pocket tab\’ on your browser window.
The Design and User Interface
Upon logging into Pocket, you’ll be greeted with a full list of saved content, which can be filtered by article, image, and video. It has a bright and clean user interface. Like many apps in late 2011 and 2012, Pocket has opted for a relatively flat look that serves to put the focus on your saved content instead of glossy bars and drop-shadow heavy overlays.
Visually, the app is a mix of clean whites and shades of gray, which helps to emphasize the colorful thumbnails tied to many of the entries. Pull to refresh can be used to sync your latest saved articles, and you can swipe on any entry to reveal options to tag, archive, save, trash, or share with other services.
Choose between grid view or list view
Prioritizing Your View-ability with Tags
One of Pocket’s biggest new features is the ability to filter by content type; you can sort by image, video, and traditional text. The saved items can be categorized based on interests and priorities in the form of tags or lists. They can be Favorited and starred giving you a personalized experience. With its enhanced user interface, the app allows its users to prioritize what they save.
The tag feature, is a great tool for content marketers who can save their favorite links and articles in various tags based on their importance and criticality. The app allows its users to save the links while they are viewing it with a simple click of the button. The saved items can be tagged immediately based upon there priority to be read under various tag head such as Social Media Marketing, Infographics, Articles, Reports, etc.
Save files while surfing!
Categorize your saved items through TAGS in your Pocket
Save the important images for your article under the tag \’Social Media Infographics\’
The Versus Game: Pocket, Readability and Instapaper
So with a range of apps to choose from, which one would serve a user best?
Technical Devices
Pocket has official apps for iOS, Android, Chrome and the web. There are also third party clients for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, WebOS and others. Instapaper on the other hand officially only supports iOS, Android, and the Kindle. Readability doesn\’t have a lot of app integration, though it does work with a few popular ones, like Pulse, Reeder, Flipboard, Tweetbot, Longofm, and iCab Mobile.
Cost of App
While you can lay your hands upon Pocket and Readability for free, Instapaper is available at $3.99 on iOS, $2.99 on Android.
Third Party Apps
Pocket has, by a good margin, the most support among third party apps. If you want to save articles from Pulse, Flipboard, the Onion, TweetBot, the Alien Blue Reddit Client, and other apps, Pocket is the service to use. It also has browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, and also a bookmarklet that works in any browser. For everything else, it has an easy save-by-email function. Instapaper and Readability doesn’t have quite as many supported apps as Pocket.
When Nate Weiner was asked if Pocket could be the first service to really “mainstream” the save-for-later concept, the young CEO brimmed with positive enthusiasm quoting, Absolutely yes — our hope is that Pocket will take ‘save-for-later to the mainstream. A ‘save for later’ service has to have ubiquity. It has to be available on every platform and supportive of all types of content. The world is visual and about more than just text. What Pocket has finally solved is finding a way to be all-encompassing while still keeping it beautifully simple.
Pocket supports your device of choice and the apps you use. It has a solid feature set and a well-put-together interface, plus it\’s supported by nearly everyone that supports a bookmark and read later app. With its added benefits in the form of the tag, archives, favorites and viewing experience, the app definitely creates a stand for itself. All this, when available at zero cost, this app definitely gets the applaud. Thus, if you want to read it later, Id says simply POCKET it.
In case you haven’t noticed already, we love the idea of running contests, and we think that amazing campaigns are the way to go forward in social. It’s not enough for you create a cool video, it’s not enough for you to create a nice infographic or a good piece of content.
You must drive the conversation. You must get people talking about your product. And one way to do that of course is to create a campaign, a contest, something that runs across networks. Heck, even if you don’t do that – how do you know what people are saying about you across networks without investing in a listening tool?
That’s where TagBoard comes in. It allows you to track hashtags across networks, giving you a bird’s eye view of everything happening in social media at the same time. If you’re running a contest and you want to see what people are saying about it, TagBoard. If you just started a discussion on Twitter and you want to know what people are saying about it on Instagram, Tumblr or Facebook – TagBoard!
Side note, if you’re looking at running a contest, you should do so with Radarr’s plug-and-play tool. It lets you create contests that you can run on your Facebook tab, as well as on your website!
A Real-Time Search Engine For Your Favorite Posts
How about a search engine for your social media interests? Yes, this is now a reality in the form of TAGBOARD! Simply put, Tagboard is a social search and display tool — powered by the hashtag. Tagboard allows its users to search, interact with, customize, moderate, and grow hashtag communities, all from a centralized and simple interface.
Create a dynamic visual mosaic of your favorite social media posts through Tagboard!
The company, headed by CEO Josh Decker was founded in 2011 and is based in Redmond, WA. Tagboard has discretely pioneered hashtag marketing and is capitalizing on the usage of hashtags in the social media. It has built a landing zone for specific hashtags or topics that are alive on social media. Tagboard aggregates social media from source networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus, and others, offering curation and display tools for mobile and web applications, as well as for large-format screens, such as stadium video boards.
Josh Decker, CEO, TAGBOARD
“We saw the hashtag as a powerful tool that could unify the conversation across the disconnected social media landscape. By bringing the conversation together in one place, we help to create powerfully, shared experiences that increase engagement and drive earned media, says CEO Josh Decker.
What marks a major start of the year for Tagboard, in the first week of March 2014, Tagboard acquired TVinteract, a company that provides on-air social media tools for the broadcast industry. The acquisition brings together two companies that are leading innovation in social media tools across multiple consumer touchpoints. As part of the acquisition, TVinteract Founder and CEO Jenni Hogan, an Emmy-award-winning interactive talent, will join Tagboard immediately as Chief Media Officer. In this role, Hogan will lead the company’s media and broadcast strategy along with continuing to develop innovative products to help move the Social TV industry forward.
TVinteract Founder and CEO Jenny Hogan
Tagboard is committed to building a powerful and innovative technology platform that delivers social media engagement to new audiences. The acquisition of TVinteract reinforces Tagboard\’s leadership in the convergence of traditional and social media, and expands our audience reach, said Decker in a recent interview with PRNews. We’re also thrilled about having a social media visionary like Jenni Hogan join the Tagboard team, he said.
The hashtag has been creeping across social networks, but the broader conversations often remain locked onto one site or platform. Tagboards live collection of social media from portals such as Facebook, Google Plus, including videos from Instagram and Vine, etc., are arranged in the form of a dynamic, visual mosaic making it easy for it users to follow and update. Tagboard users can customize the content’s appearance, embed it, and browse analytics to see how it’s performing.
Decker described the product as a way to ‘magnetize’ the hashtag and have it pull together disconnected posts to create a larger and more powerful conversation. Decker initiated Tagboard with the aim of adding social content to forums and soon shifted focus towards real-time social media content.
Features that speak for Tagboard:
Use Tagboard to follow conversations
Tagboard is ideal for following hashtag conversations. Not only can you follow the same hashtag across multiple social networks, but the content is displayed beautifully, making the experience that much better! Start exploring your favorite hashtags by typing it into the search bar, or choose one of their featured hashtags to see some new and exciting Tagboards.
Never miss out on anything important! Click “Search” and it will take you to a board full of updates that include that hashtag. Audi has a premium custom branded Tagboard. From this page you can share the tagboard with friends by clicking the “Tweet #Audi” button on the right.
Creating Your Own Hashtag:
There are many benefits to creating a Tagboard page for your hashtag. You can use a tagboard page as a brand manager, business owner, twitter chat organizer to promote a hashtag or to aggregate posts using a hashtag for a new product launch, weddings, parties, events, and social campaigns, to name a few examples.
To create your own Tagboard page for your hashtag, start by typing your hashtag into the search bar.
Once you have typed in the name of your hashtag, you’ll be directed to a page with the conversation about that hashtag. Add a picture of your choice and simply click “Create Tagboard” next to the hashtag name.
Next, fill out the form by writing a short, but detailed description of the hashtag, upload a square photo, and add your website link if you have one. Remember, capitalization matters and it’s generally best practice to capitalize the beginning of each word in the hashtag.
Then, click “Create Tagboard.” You’re done!
With owning your own hashtag comes the ability to have a branded page, the ability to moderate and curate posts on your Tagboard page. Stay ahead in marketing your products or simply be aware of what is going on in the posts that interest you, create a Tagboard hashtag and it helps you be well versed with your information needs. Reply to tweets, post a reply on your Facebook post, share an image or a video on Instagram or simply see what responses your blog gets on Google+, all on the same window – Tagboard!
Creating a repository for your inspirations, your likes, your imaginations- an idea that inspired many is now a technology in the form of Pinterest. Surrounded by market leaders like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest has created a niche for itself as the latest paradigm shift.
Pinterest is like the visual bulletin board of the web. It helps its users create boards of distinguished categories, marked by capturing images which can be pinned or followed by other users of like interests, on their boards.
Launched in March 2010, Pinterest got listed among the top 10 largest Social Networking sites with over 11 million visitors per week. The site which provides a few million of your favorite things has got many aides to it. Creating a fan following at Pinterest, like Facebook or twitter, needs constant ‘pins’ at regular intervals. The key is to actively engage your followers with new content and now that can be done without manually pinning every next hour.
Creating a fan following for on your Pinterest accounts made easy? Viraltag is the answer to that one. Earlier known as Pingraphy, Viraltag is a scheduling tool for Pinterest that allows you to schedule, analyse and share your pins on their dashboard.
“Viraltag is a value proposition for the small and medium scale businesses to market their images and products on Pinterest, Tumblr, Fancy, Visual.ly. We have a team of six members, two of us in the USA and four in India. We have a business that aims at driving better traffic towards social media. Our USP is the time that we save for our users. For example, if my user is in the business of fashion accessories, we help by providing insights into details like what accessories are your followers interested in and we guide them to those links thus helping them create further content,” said Mr, Sudheer Someshwara, Founder, Viraltag.
The man who caused chaos when he declared the closure of Pingraphy, came back with a big surprise in the form of Viraltag.
Viraltag- Helps you Schedule, Bulk Update, Track you Pins on your Pinterest Account
Features of the Tool
Bulk Uploading
This option forms one of the USPs of Viraltag. Users can upload images in bulk, if required, all at once in a particular board or different boards. This feature helps you get away with manually selecting and pinning pictures individually.
When a footwear giant or a famous handbag label wants to share their latest intellection, this would mean several photos to be shared with its users. To keep the propulsion bearable, Viraltag allows its users to schedule the their photos to be updated and pinned at regular intervals, sparing their viewers a visual blast of updates at one go or wasting precious hours in manually pinning their pictures on their dashboards.
This awesome GIF courtesy – Hootsuite!
Tracking
With scheduling being just one part of it, Viraltag boasts of allowing its users to track their Pinterest accounts visibility, that means, you can analyse the fan following and Repins that you receive. With Pingraphy’s incognito disappearance, most of the users of Pinterest were left to struggle with the standard measures of creating pins. However, now with the re-launch of Pingraphy under the appellation VIRALTAG is a sigh of relief to many.
Bookmarklet
Viraltag supports a Viraltag Bookmarklet which can be dragged and dropped on your toolbar. This toolbar can be used while surfing, to directly upload pins from the website you are surfing to your Pinterest account.
Drag – Drop ! You decide the time and leave the rest to us.
Viraltag has several competitors like Tailwind, Pinalerts, Piquora, Pinsmatic that provide various services aiding Pinterest users. These brands however, focus extensively upon the bigger brands on Pinterest. For example Piquora requires a $2,000 per month subscription fee. When asked about how Viraltag surfaced the market with such competition, Sudheer added, “They are all enterprise focused while we cater to the small and medium scale businesses. We are more like a Facebook or a BuddyMedia, where in, there is a huge market share while we maintain our league towards the small scale enterprises.”
Currently, Viraltag offers paid plans at different monthly prices based on features and the volume of usage. There is also an option of a two week free trial before you subscribe. With the amount of time saved and extra sales earned, it is definitely making a stand for itself in the market. There are about 2000 paid accounts that are actively using Viraltag while they get around 3.5 million visits every month. Viraltag’s major traction and market share encompasses mainly the USA while they also have a fair share of users in the UK, Australia and Singapore.
Although Pinterest is yet to claim the Indian market, India serves measly 3% of Viraltag’s user base. Currently, 40% to 50% of their user base is from small and medium scale businesses while 20% to 30% are individual users like interior designers, fashion designers, food blogger, etc. 10% to 15% of Viraltag users are the big brands like Locoste, Hearst Corp (Cosmopolitan), Estee Lauder, Discovery Channel, Nanette Lepore, 99designs.
What’s Next for Viraltag?
In the year 2014, Viraltag plans to encompass some most awaited attributes for its users. Firstly, in March this year, they plan on launching a service called Discover. “For example if a user who is an interior designer plans on updating something, discover would link them to the latest trending images in the interior world and other links on Pinterest, tumblr, flickr, google, etc. that they could utilize and pin or follow on their own social accounts. We also will provide for a search engine where in key words can be used to discover the desired trending images.” said Sudheer when speaking with Beta21.
Viraltag’s vision and mission statement constitutes helping the small and medium scale businesses drive traffic. Based on this goal, they mainly aim at helping them create an effective market for themselves. Currently Viraltag users can post, make bulk uploads and schedule them, while also tracking there uploads.
But Viraltag now plans to make things further easrier for its users with their latest developments which shall soon be out in the market. In their next release, Viraltag would be providing its users with the facility to link their Viraltag accounts with not just Pinterest, but with other accounts such as Facebook, Tumblr and other social media accounts where in they can make bulk uploads and post their updates in all these accounts simultaneously. “We would be helping them with their content management, going by our saying ‘helping you in what to market and when to market it,Sudheer added.
Are you using Viraltag? What are the pros and cons you’ve noticed in this up and coming social media tool?
“I want to see a picture before I buy what you say” – I have and I am sure even you have said and heard these words before, being the buyer or a seller. Words have been ruling our expressions, but saying ‘IT’ with pictures is what we all do now. Yes! If we want to sell our blog post to our readers or a commercial ad, or a simple Facebook post, we take hours in finding and then link in a perfect picture usually from a search in the Google Images, ignoring the threat of trespassing by the owner. Social media marketing tools have evolved once again and brings to us a search engine for visual inspiration and free stock photos for the advertising community and public domain called – Compfight!
From the adults, the teenagers to the \’not so teenager\’, social media has got everything in everyone\’s lives out for a show! With this being its reach, it is unfathomable for big companies and market giants to ignore this plethora of opportunities in the field of advertising.
Social media tools like twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn today form the ‘address’ of almost everyone, conquering and changing the way of thinking of today’s individuals and companies, thus, making ‘them’ the obvious choice for commercial giants to say what they want being heard!
Photos form an essential part of our blogs and draw people towards our post. Unfortunately, laying hands upon a great click can many a times, lighten the weights in our wallets and if we go at that rate, regular blogging can cost a fortune. A simple solution – Compfight is a powerful visual search engine that helps you locate images you actually want to find by searching Flickr’s photos that have the appropriate Creative Commons license for commercial use which means that we can use the images without having to gain explicit permission from the image owner. All you have to do is create an account and downloads your favourite images in just a click!
There are other tools such as Xpert that people use for searching images and adapting them for their use. However, Xpert attaches the relevant reference information and licence to the image as part of the image, that is, it shows where the image has come from and this information cannot be separated from the image.
Compfight, on the other hand, does not attach the reference to the image the way Xpert does and if one needs to reference the image, it can be done separately. When an image needs to be found, Compfight searches Flickr and then displays the results as a series of small thumbnails, which once clicked, it takes you to the relevant image page on Flickr.
So what does Compfight Offer?
Compfight makes it convenient for its users to easily search from a database of a host of images on Flickr. With just an input of a keyword or several key words, Compfight grants a huge array of images on a single page without any miscellaneous information. For images with a blue bar at the bottom of an image will conveniently give the dimensions. The only downside is that this enhancement is only available for the original images found on Flickr.
Work Wonders With The Advanced Settings
Out of the many highlights of Compfight, the advanced setting will definitely grab your attention. What compfight allows is, you can toggle your search phrase between tags and the entire text. This is splendid if a particular setting yields weak results – Just switch to the other and see if it helps! The search results can also be restricted to Creative Common Licenses, even for the commercial images. Are you looking for ‘only’ original images? That too can be taken care of by using safe-search.
The Perfect Image Finder For Bloggers
As mentioned earlier, Compfight is a perfect tool for bloggers to utilize for finding images for their posts. A multitude of features, topped with some awesome settings, for both, commercial and non- commercial blogs, Compfight will never let you down! While Google Image Search can make your run with legal issues at your back for using licensed images without permissions, you are in safe hands with Compfight. Hands on, Compfight also beats messing around with Flickr’s advanced settings. While Flickr may have more options, Compfight hands over to you the most popular advances settings minus the added hassles and confusion.
