With a new year upon us, millions of bloggers are considering what they can do to help boost exposure for their posts and bring more traffic to their website. Whether it is more subscribers, new likes via social media or a desire to persuade more people into purchasing a product, marketing and SEO are fundamental components of any of these strategies. In order to accomplish this as effectively as possible, you will need to procure some tools that can help get the job done. There are hundreds of standalone programs, plug-ins and other solutions that each promise one benefit or another, but which ones are above and beyond the rest when it comes to optimizing social media and blogs? In the following article, we’ll discuss three of these solutions so that you can spend more time working and less time tweaking.

Social Crawlytics

One of the best ways that you can optimize your social media presence is to first determine where and how your competition is using it. In the world of social media, your competitors most likely already have fans and followers that would also be interested in your products and services – if they only knew about them. Social Crawlytics is a great tool that sheds light on where and how your competitors are using social media. Whether they are pinging users with information on their products or sharing multimedia from other websites, this comprehensive tool can be used to ascertain it all. With this information in hand, you can then begin to target the locations and portals that would be most effective in terms of competition.

DoShare

A great way to schedule posts for Google Plus, DoShare can be used to ensure that your content is distributed in a timely fashion. Not only can this come in handy for your standard social media updates, but you can configure it with Google Authorship to have all content from your blog posted to social media at a set time after its publication. By default, Authorship feeds content to Google Plus immediately, but you can tinker with this so that it always hits your status feeds at just the right time. You will also be able to directly share any page to your Google Plus profile instantaneously if you are using Google Chrome, so this is a great way to augment both your social media and blog optimization in 2014.

Open Site Explorer

Last but not least, Open Site Explorer allows anyone to find mentions of their brand or website across the web by pinging users’ social media posts and blogs. Whenever you have an inclination that others are discussing your brand and you want to take a proactive approach, Open Site Explorer can be a godsend that allows you to find the discussions and interact with people in real time. Also included in Open Site Explorer are tools that allow you to determine how well you are ranking against your competitors. Nobody should be doing business on the web in 2014 without a great, multi-faceted tool such as Open Site Explorer.