Since the advent of social media, everybody has been in the race for monitoring and sharing engaging content. From free downloads to reward programs, every action has been focused on the sole idea of sharing content. Where some companies allow healthy sharing of links and encourage link building, one company playing this game the dangerous way is Snip.ly.

Snip.ly is a marketing tool that helps you drive conversions through every link you share on social media. Whenever you come across something worth sharing on the Internet, attach a custom call-to-action to your share link and convert what could be a simple share to something that drives conversion for you. Let us show you how.

Start snipping with Snip.ly

Snip.ly allows using relevant content on the internet to be used to generate traffic to your website, thereby allowing for conversion. The underlying concept of Snip.ly is to attach a call-to-action message to every link that you share on social media. While this borders on legal as well as ethical infringements, Snip.ly refuses to claim to have overcome any legal hurdles in trying to make content sharing quick and easy. Here are some of the features of this much talked-about application:

• The tool is available as web application as well as a widget.
• It allows you to attach an eye-catching button, custom banner image, hyperlinked text, or email capture form to the post you share. Users can click the button to visit your webpage directly or in the case of email capture, sign up for your mailing list.
• The tool gives you access to a wide range of themes, custom colors, positioning, custom domain, short-links, and more.
• Using Snip.ly you can track and analyze your clicks and conversions through snips.
• It allows you to track actions taken on your website through conversion pixels
• Snip.ly integrates with a ton of apps, extensions, and APIs.
• With the tool, you can also include custom code for tracking, CSS, scripting, and even retargeting pixels to your snips.

Tool working

1. Find content on the internet that is relevant to your business.
   Ensure that you select content that already has a lot of footfall and is directly connected to your domain.
2. Go to the Snip.ly web app at snip.ly.
3. After you sign up, click Create My First Snip on the left panel.
4. Generate your brand profile and click Continue.
5. On the Setup your CTA pane, type your call to action message in the Message field.
6. In the Button Text field, type the text you want to display on your call to action button.
7. In the Button URL field, type the URL of the website you want the reader to be directed.
8. On the Choose a page to snip panel, type the URL of the content you identified in Step 1. Snip.ly will generate a compressed URL for you to share.
9. Copy the compressed URL and start sharing. You can share this URL on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, whichever social media site you may wish to share it to.

Pros and Cons

The positives include:

• It is, as of today, the easiest way to share content.
• It is simple to use and it comes with a free version.
• It gives you a better chance to obtain new traffic to your website and also convert it.
• The Analytics page gives you a detailed report on your snips, including the total number of clicks and conversions.

The negatives include:

• The use of Snip.ly is somewhat considered controversial.
• Unless you give credit to the original content creator, using content freely for your own gains can be frowned upon.
• Readers are usually not very happy to see ads on their favorite sites. You might tick off quite a few of these people.
• While there are no legal issues surrounding the subject, ethical infringement can be a matter of concern for some of us.

Pricing

The basic account registered with Snip.ly is free and allows users to create one user profile with the ability to share unlimited number of links, and extract up to 100 conversions a month.

The tool also offers different paid packages with different range of benefits. They typically come at a price of $16 to $85 a month, ranging from 500 to 5000 conversions along with the ability to view your analytics. The paid versions allow a lot of customization in the form of themes, colors, positioning, and so on. They also come with data gathering tools such as analytics and conversion pixel.

• Drive conversion through every link you share on social media, with @sniply snip.ly/ via @supermonitoring

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Conclusion

While it is easy to use and everything, one thing that bothered us while using it was the matter of ethics. However, this can be overcome if you decide to mention the credit to the original content creator. Snip.ly might have been acquitted of all legal infringements, but it is still high in controversy. If you feel comfortable with that, there is no reason why you shouldn’t start snipping and attracting traffic.

The modern online space is ruled by articles. People are information hungry. They wish to read about and practice good habits, food choices, lifestyle decisions, work ethics, and everything else as other people like them. That’s why they keep researching online, monitoring product reviews and success stories, and engage in online communities. So if you have a product or service that you wish the world to know about, the most efficient way to do it would probably be to popularize it online by generating targeted content. Sounds simple enough!

But in reality, writing about products and services and actually being able to convince people to invest in them are two different things. You can boast and brag about your delicious yogurt based products, their health benefits, and how millions have used it to their advantage, but being able to drive an online visitor into clicking that “Buy Now” button isn’t exactly a cakewalk.

Need a little help there? Try Openr!

Openr – Drive action from the content you share

Openr is an innovative online tool that lets you convert content into action. It lets you drive your marketing content such that you can turn awareness into actual business. Normally, to convince people into buying your product you’d need to generate marketing content of the highest quality produced by some of the finest writers and marketers. With Openr, you won’t that anymore. The platform can be thought of as a personalized conversation starter that allows you to engage your audience with your earned content such that they cannot resist making a purchase.

The tool includes provisions for everything from campaign workflows, fully customizable brand profiles & extensive analytics in a user-friendly platform to convert all your earned content into something more actionable within your media plan. It offers advantages such as:

• More traffic from your earned content
• Sale leads capturing & email sign-ups
• Feedback & Opinion gathering through quick polls

You may ask what features the tool has to make it so appealing. Well, here they are:

• Customizable designs and layouts so you can change the look-and-feel of your content to match your brand image
• Mobile optimization so your audience is able to engage however they browse
• Media manager that lets you share content, image, video, or PDF directly
• Real-time analytics dashboard to track all tool links
• Social media integration so you can share your content to social channels directly
• Campaign Management to generate messages that align your marketing activities & speed up your workflow
• A/B Split Testing to setup and analyze multiple messages to increase conversion rates
• Geo-location and Language targeting to automatically detect and attract audiences based in different countries
• Team Collaboration
• Payment Processing through the Openr Payments System
• Option to receive a Custom Domain

There are a lot of other cool features packed within this tool. Visit it to find out more.

Tool Working

The working of the tool has been explained on the website in a couple of steps:

1. Identify all earned content for your brand
2. Add your brand message and CTA to activate the earned content
3. Incorporate the activated content into your media plan
4. Track Openr links to see all the views and clicks your content gets

When we were reviewing the tool, new user registrations were closed since the tool was being acquired by some other bigger player. So we read a couple of success stories in the tool’s blog to find out exactly how they used it. What we gathered from the stories is summarized here.

Suppose you have an edible product that helps boost immunity. Instead of creating direct in-your-face content to push it across to your users, create content that’s more subtle, like tips to lead a healthy lifestyle by eating healthy food and consuming natural products. Thereafter, use Openr in conjunction with whatever tool you’re using to promote your content. Openr will make it so that with every click on the content readers will see not only your content, but also your product’s Openr message. The message will link the content to your brand thereby driving awareness. The subsequent call-to-action in the message would be to add your product to basket in a chosen supermarket, to drive sales.

Pretty neat if you ask us!

Pros VS Cons

To be fair we wouldn’t want to comment on this product since we didn’t get a chance to use it fully. But if it indeed does what it says, it would be a boon for organizations looking for a more concrete online marketing strategy. That is, of course, if the tool doesn’t have a steep learning curve attached with it.

• Convert your marketing content into Sales, with openr.co/ @magicopenr via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

Like us, you’ll have to wait for new user registrations to begin to find out how worthy this tool actually is.

“As an avid blogger, my mind often throws situations at me that I try to put into words and share with the world. But I’m not great at taking or collecting photos. Thus, often, my personal blog posts don’t feature an image. And I’m well aware that reading a blog post without an appropriate picture takes away half the fun from it. So I usually rely on the Internet for copyright free images. However, recently, I’ve been having a little trouble finding the perfect photos for my blog. Can anyone suggest any good tools or websites where I can find great pictures of random shots? I don’t mind buying them at a nominal price too.”

Sorry, if that went on for a little too much! But what we wanted to share was a problem quite a few bloggers and social media marketers come across. A picture adds weight to any post, thought or expression. You can’t express as much with words as you can with photos. Thus, people are always monitoring different photo-sharing websites in search of the perfect shots to adorn their blogs or social media pages. If you like sharing beautiful shots on your social media timelines or blog posts, Pablo is one tool you should definitely check out.

Pablo – Create the perfect social-media sharable images!

Pablo is an online tool that lets you upload photos or search photos from a huge library and add quotations, statistics or logos to make them sharable on social media and blogs for personal or professional purposes. The makers of the tool quite aptly recognize the fact that a blog post or a Facebook / Twitter share with a picture is read and further shared a lot more than one without a picture. Similarly, consider the case of a lengthy blog post. If it’s just an array of paragraphs with continuous text or statistics, no matter how interested you are in the subject matter, as a reader, you will get bored at one point. But if that same post contains 2 – 3 photos with appropriate quotations, percentage figures etc. the post engagement would be much more.

This is where Pablo steps in. This unique tool lets you transform beautifully captured random shots into pieces of art or information by adding custom text or quotations to it and then share them on popular social networking websites. You may also choose to download the photos to your computer and use them on your personal blogs or professional articles. Neat!

Here’s how you can use Pablo

To start using Pablo, you can click on the big blue button that says “Try Pablo it’s free!” on the homepage or click on the “Menu” button on the upper right corner of the screen and select the option to Try Pablo. If you’re expecting to find a sign-up page, here’s another good news – it’s not required. Could it be any simpler?

As soon as you click on the ‘Try’ button, you’re redirected to the image editor page. Before you start using the tool, in order to help you out with the nitty-gritties, a quick tour of the app is displayed in quite an interactive manner. Once you’re through, you can start playing around.

Towards the upper left side of the tool’s screen, you’ll find a “Search” box. Enter a keyword for the kind of picture you wish to search. For example, type ‘Pasta’ and hit enter. All images of pasta that exist in Pablo’s database will be listed vertically. Select any of the images by clicking on it and it will be enlarged in the space adjacent to the list. Now comes the interesting part – the edits.

You can:

• Alter the size of the image as per the social media platform or technique through which you wish to share the image: Pinterest, Email, Facebook / Twitter
• If you’ve uploaded a photo that doesn’t make a good background, you can apply effects (Contrast, Blur, Black-and-White) to it to fix it
• Insert Text on the image. The text can be something you type (custom) or a random quote from Pablo’s database. You can also alter the font size, type, alignment, and color of the text.
• You may share the image to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or Buffer directly from Pablo or Download it to your computer.

Additional Features

In addition to the above mentioned way to use it, you may also choose to join the Pablo community in order to receive articles about how to create engaging social images and other interesting things (this is where you need to sign up).

Moreover, you may also install the browser extension for Pablo to make using it easier.

Pros VS Cons

There are several plus points to the tool:

• A photo library with more than 50K beautiful photos
• No sign-up required, no hidden costs involved
• Option to upload self-taken photos and share with the world
• Facility to apply edits on pictures
• Facility to share or download pictures without any strict license requirements

As far as the negative are concerned, there was only a single noticeable one:

• There should be more advanced edits available

• Prepare perfect images for social media with pablo.buffer.com/ @pablobybuffer via @supermonitoring

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Final Words

Pablo is one tool that won’t disappoint you. So the next time you wish to grab your 10 seconds of fame by sharing something awesome with the world, create the perfect image with this simple, yet brilliant tool.

Facebook has captured the world’s imagination. So much so, that the name of the platform has become synonymous to social networking. And it’s not restricted to youngsters anymore. What started off as a place for young people to find close friends and connect with them, has evolved into a stage for sharing ideas, doing business, marketing and more for people of all age groups. Today, any and every thought that comes across your mind can be transformed into a Facebook post; be it a simple hello to an advertisement for your product.

However, often, many users don’t realize the kind of versatility they can exercise while sharing posts about pages and feel content just by sharing simple text and maybe a few default images picked up by Facebook. Better put, users are not given all the access rights they would like to have in order to create the perfect Facebook post for sharing a page. Enter Preepo!

Preepo – The Facebook post wizard!

With Preepo, you can create an ideal Facebook post. This amazing and handy tool allows you to have full control of a post when sharing a page (an article, a product, etc.) on Facebook. It works outside of Facebook just like an editor. That means that you get all the freedom you’d like to play around with the post title, post description and any images you’d like to put in it. No sign-ups or registration required and no strings attached!

With Preepo, you get to experience tremendous creativity while creating custom posts about your Facebook pages. You can create posts reflecting the exact style that matches that of your page because Preepo lets you pick the text, description and images from the page you’re sharing. That is, you can borrow your page’s style and showcase your work better through improved posting techniques. It can prove to be a boon for creating a market buzz about your product page on Facebook too. Sounds cool doesn’t it?

How it works

It’s actually pretty simple. Visit the page www.preepo.com and enter the URL of your website (the one for which you have a Facebook page and want to share it on your wall) in the box indicated for the purpose. Then click ‘Go’. The next page that you’ll see will contain the URL you entered above followed by a larger box which showcases the content for the proposed post.

The first thing that you’ll see in the large editor box is the homepage image at the URL you mentioned (default website image or cover photo). The image will have 2 options – edit and delete located on its upper right corner. Clicking on the scissors sign will open up an editor for the image. The editor will allow you to scale up / down the image or crop it. Pressing ‘Esc’ causes the editor to close. If you want a different image to be showcased in the post, you can simply click on the image and an option to “Upload Custom Image” will open up. You can then browse your system and pick any image you like for the purpose. A cool feature offered by this tool is that apart from loading images from the page being shared or enabling upload of a custom image, Preepo also provides an option to choose the page screenshot as an alternative. Next in the editor box is the post title followed by the post content. Both of these can be edited by clicking once on them. Finally you’ll see the link of the URL which will be displayed at the end of the post. This is obviously not editable.

Though the process is very simple and straightforward, if you do get a little confused, just hover above any button or section and helpful tooltips will explain its significance to you.

Sharing Options

Preepo allows you to share your custom posts in two ways. One – through a link generated instantly. This can be done by clicking on the “Generate Link” button just below the editor box. This link can be put on your blog and website. Two – through a direct Facebook post. There is a “Post to Facebook” button for this purpose too below the editor box. Clicking on this button naturally takes to the Facebook login page where after putting in the credentials, your post will be shared on your wall.

The Good vs the Bad

The good definitely includes the creative freedom. Options to alter the image, title and description of a page just the way you want them to be is a refreshing change and feels liberating compared to the setting of picking up the default version of everything by Facebook. Another plus is the no-sign in required policy. If you choose to go ahead with the “Generate Link” option, you actually don’t have to give in any credentials at all. Plus, Preepo offers an easy to use bookmark for your browser that can be created by simply dragging and dropping a link to your shortcut bar.

There is actually no downside to this tool. It’s simple to use, fulfills its purpose and works smoothly. What more could you ask of it!

• Share web links on your #Facebook wall the best way possible with preepo.com/ #socialmedia via @supermonitoring

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Wrapping it Up

For something to be perfect it needs to be done with complete freedom of thought and expression. That rule applies aptly to Preepo. Experience it today and unleash your true marketing skills!