Dan McDonnell on 5 Social Media Tools For Curation and Visualization

Hello, my name is Dan McDonnell and I am a Community Manager at the American Evaluation Association (AEA). With the vast amount of information going back and forth on social media channels, it can be difficult to filter and parse that data in meaningful ways. Luckily, there are dozens of third-party applications and tools that can make your life on social media easier, and make you a more efficient user, saving you time and headaches. Here’s where to start:

1. Buffer: Make scheduling tweets simple. 

Want to share tons of great content with your social media followers but don’t have the time to log in to multiple times a day to do so? Buffer will automatically schedule your social media posts to distribute at times where your followers are most active, saving you time and making sure your posts are read by your followers.

2. Hashtagify: Visualize an ecosystem of hashtags.

Enter a hashtag that you follow, and Hashtagify will show you a diagram of related hashtags, giving you insight into other interesting conversations happening on social media that you may not have been aware of.

3. Paper.li: Automatically create your own Twitter newsletter.

Find yourself frequently retweeting or sharing content from some of your favorite folks on social media? Paper.li will create a custom newsletter based on content shared by Twitter users you identify, and automatically share it with your followers daily, weekly or at whatever interval you choose.

4. Storify: Tell a story with social media posts.

Rather than having to embed or copy/paste links from Twitter to your blog, Storify makes it simple to curate tweets that you select to visually tell a story from social media content. For example, this Storify keeps track of all of the major updates in the recent Malaysian missing flight that has been in the news.

5. Tweetbinder: Data visualization and analytics for Twitter hashtags.

Visualize an in-depth set of metrics on a hashtag of your choice. This tools breaks down the who, what, where and when of how the hashtag is being used, and is an excellent way to see the impact of your tweets and find new people to follow on Twitter.

Many of these tools offer paid versions, but have free versions or trials that offer you some (if not most) of the functionality that you’ll need. What other social media tools do you use to save time or help in your curation efforts?

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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