Top 10 Best FREE Social Media Marketing Tools for 2015

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Are you looking for free tools to improve, organise, and analyse your social media marketing? I've compiled a list of 10 of the best resources out there as we begin 2015. Some of the tools listed below have a paid option in addition to their free offering, but be reassured that you can benefit from all of them without having to spend a penny.

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How to Make Beautiful Slideshare Presentations Quickly With Haiku Deck

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Want to create captivating Slideshare presentations for content marketing, brand awareness and knowledge exchange, but hate fiddling with PowerPoint and Keynote or just pressed for time? Haiku Deck could be the solution you have been looking for.

Haiku Deck - a simple and intuitive tool for creating slideshow presentations - has existed as a standalone app on the web and for mobile devices for some time, but earlier this month, Slideshare rolled out the first phase in a partnership with the brand, allowing you to use the tool directly on the Slideshare website in three easy steps:

  1. "Craft your message: Choose the type of slide format you want and simply type your text.
  2. Select outstanding images: Search millions of free, high-quality Creative Commons images to make a powerful statement or upload your own.
  3. Choose a style: Pick from a range of fonts, background colors and design layouts to give your deck the exact look and feel you want." 

Haiku Deck's Slideshare integration currently works best on desktops, so what follows is an overview of what you can expect to find. Hopefully it will encourage you to build your own slideshows to be seen by Slideshare's 70 million+ users.

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6 Ways to Brand Your Images For Social Media (And Why You Should Start Today)

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Social networks, more and more, are becoming a visual as a medium. With so much competition for eyeballs, it is important  for brands to ensure that their images are as eye-catching and recognisable as possible in order to get noticed. High quality images are one thing, but having fans instantly recognise when an image has been posted by you as they scroll through their visually-saturated news feeds, is also crucial.

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The Benefits of Sharing Infographics on Slideshare

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The Benefits of Sharing Infographics on Slideshare

In recognition of the growing popularity of infographics as a way of sharing data, in July 2013, Slideshare introduced an infographic-specific player to the site. It automatically detects an infographic upon upload, includes it in the infographic directory and displays it for best viewing.

Some of the web's biggest brands including LinkedIn, The Huffington Post, and Mashable, are already taking advantage of the new player and, it seems, with good reason...

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Slideshare's Hyperlink Clampdown: A Demo and Workaround Tips

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Slideshare is a fantastic tool for individuals and businesses to share ideas and reach an audience of many millions of people. And while the site enourages the publishing of insightful and helpful content, it looks now to be clamping down on those whose presentations don't quite share its priorities. As such, any links that appear on the first three slides of a Slideshare presentation will not be clickable. 

As you can see in the hastily-created four-slide demonstration above, the hyperlinks I have placed on the first three slides are not clickable, but the one on the final slide is.

In my book, 500 Social Media Marketing Tips , I recommend that Slideshare users include links in the opening slides of their presentations... not necessarily big, bold, and in your face, but at least given a presence in case a viewer takes notice but does not necessarily reach the end of the presentation. Better to have it appear even subtly than not at all! Placing it at the bottom of every slide, unobtrusively, is another alternatively. 

Now that this change has rolled out, I would not change my advice, but do suggest that if you are going to feature hyperlinks at the very beginning of your Slideshare presentations, that the URLs are short and memorable. If your links is long and complicated and  not clickable, the chances of someone taking the time to type it manually into their browser's address bar is slim to none.

Andrew Macarthy is the author of the #1 Amazon Web Marketing Bestseller, 500 Social Media Marketing Tips, available for Kindle and in paperback.

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