For those who have been users of content marketing in 2012, many new developments were introduced into the way we share and promote our websites, blogs, products and services. With the new year upon us, many have set new goals and guidelines for how they will conduct their online operations – hopefully built around a broader theme of steady, responsible growth. If you are finding yourself in need of new or additional methods of content marketing, then you will want to continue reading to find out how you can boost efficiency, monitor analytics and saturate more networks than you ever thought possible.

SocialBro

Many of us have had a completely random post go viral with no discernible explanation. Sometimes, luck plays a role and it helps to be in the right place at the right time. How can you optimize this effect? SocialBro is constantly pinging services you have on Facebook, Twitter and other major networks to collect information that shows you – in graphic fashion – just when your followers are online. This helps you schedule status updates, tweets and other posts to coincide with when your audience is most active.

StumbleUpon

Millions of people use StumbleUpon to browse the internet in semi-random fashion, but there is a paid solution offered that allows you to place ads via the service. Since StumbleUpon is built by default to take into account what users are interested in and what they are not, it makes sense that StumbleUpon’s demographic classifications are much more honed than some might think. The basic cost to use the service is essentially comparable to a PPC of 10 cents. Certain social networking groups have found particular use with this service, as it provides direct impressions upon a younger target audience.

Social Crawlytics

Balancing multiple social sharing outlets can be quite difficult – and normally leads to one or more of them being abandoned in some way, shape or form. In order to negate that, Social Crawlytics offers the ability to aggregate all of your content marketing objectives into social share indicators, showing which posts and platforms are doing well and which ones are not. You’ll easily be able to use their pinging services to see which pages are being shared the most (with the free version), or can gather and analyse comprehensive sets of data about any and all pages (premium version).

Toluna

Have you tried multiple advertising campaigns with no success? Failing to bring one-time visitors back to your site? Toluna may be able to offer a survey-based solution. For virtually no money at all, you can create surveys that record data from willing participants who are compensated for their input. This can be used an as opportunity to obtain information from non-biased individuals about what is good about your website and what is not. While the sample audience may not be the best for measuring any and all aspects of your site or blog, it can give you some broader insight into what people think about your project in a broader sense.