You might think you have your content promotion on lock, but aren’t you always intrigued — perhaps overwhelmed even — by all the tools available? In just 5 minutes, Marketing School’s Neil and Eric explain some of the most effective tools that can elevate your content promotion. You’ll even find out why contacting those who follow your competitors can also help you boost your own content promotion. Did we mention it was only 5 minutes?

Here are those hella-exceptional tools:

1. Facebook ads (obvi) — Shout out to Facebook’s easy button, “boost post”.
2. BuzzSumo — Click view shares and you’ll see the people who tweeted articles related to your own, then email those people to promote yours!
3. MeetEdgar — We talked about how cool this tool was yesterday.
4. Ahrefs — Find who’s linking your competitor’s content and message them to promote yours as well. Ah, the old “Hey, mine is way better, here’s why” trick.
5. If This Then That (IFTTT) — Allows you to automate workflows and automatically push to social channels.
6. Broken links — Come again? Using a broken link checker, you can see who’s clicking on broken links that has similar content to yours. Then, reach out to them!
7. Sniply — Enhances every link that you share by automatically adding a call to action that will lead your audience to your own content. Like a shameless plug, but better.

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Today’s Read is hard to sum up in just 200 words, so we’re gonna jump right into it.

If you really want to get value from your social media efforts, you need a well-defined strategy. That’s what a lot of people miss out on — the actual strategy portion of social media. You can’t just randomly post things and hope it works for your company. (Well, you could, but that sounds like a formula for failure.)

Three things you need to define as part of your strategy:

1. Who is your core audience? If you know this, you’ll have an easier time figuring out what content will resonate the most with your audience. Don’t just guess at this. You can use a combination of social media analytics and Google Analytics to help figure this out!
2. What types of content should you post? You can use competitor research to help with this. Do a thorough breakdown of your competitors’ social pages to figure out what is resonating with their audiences. But, here’s a secret this Read doesn’t mention — don’t do exactly what your competitors are doing ’cause then you’ll just blend in.
3. Set the right goals. No, don’t just set goals like, “We want 1,000,000 followers by tomorrow.” Do you want website traffic, conversions, impressions, or…? Goal setting is vital to this process.

Alright, this is summary is getting away from us. You gotta read this one for yourself…

It’s Friday, and if you change out the “d” for “y”, it’s Fri-yay, and we are here for that pun. Taking Fri-yay into consideration, we’re featuring one of those creative roundups we love so much for today’s Watch.

Does that headline say the most watched YouTube ads? As marketers, we’re used to seeing YouTube ads framed as something far beyond mere annoyance. So it’s pretty rad when others are paying attention to them, as well. See what captivating spots made the list. Maybe you tuned in to them, too.