In this day and age, Social Media has become an important arm for all communications. It adds an amazing punch to your communications arsenal and allows businesses to reach out to customers effectively. With that said, social media communication can get tricky. People today expect immediate responses and resolutions which makes managing social media effectively super important. Many businesses setup their social accounts but fail to make a real impact because of the way they are managed. They key to improving your social media footprint is to use tools that help you effectively manage your efforts. This is needless to say that your content is in place. We will talk about content for social media in a later article but for now let’s focus on the Social Media management tools that will help you get the best out of your social media efforts.
Buffer: Buffer is an amazing tool that can literally take hours off your work. An important aspect of any communication is timing, and Buffer helps in making sure all your updates are made at the best possible time. It’s a brilliant scheduler that allows you to schedule your posts at intervals you decide. It’s easy to use and their intuitive analytics provides amazing insights regarding the performance of each post. We’d recommend getting a free version to test it out and get the paid one to really get things going.
Commun.it: If you have a bunch of followers you should’ve fased this problem of segmenting them. For instance, can you identify your top influencers or your top detractors? Better yet, do you know who to interact with or who’s spam? Commun.it will help you with all this and a LOT more. It’s a nifty little tool that’s a must for all social media marketers.
Mention: Mention has been our in-house favorite. It’s so good, no mention (pun not intended) ever goes unseen. As a brand it’s super important to know who’s talking about you online. Not just on the Facebook and Twitter but other channels like blogs, forums and so on. Mention scours the internet and looks for your wherever your company is mentioned. You can set up industry related keywords and competitor names too. It’ll get back to you with a real time update, whenever the keywords you specify have been used anywhere on the internet.
Hootsuite: We don’t think Hootsuite needs any introduction. It’s the ultimate social media management tool. Get a birds eye view of how your social media handles are performing, get updates, schedule posts, get amazingly in depth analytics, all in just 1 great tool.
Bit.ly: We all share links via our social networks from time-to-time but their performance is something that not a lot of folks track closely. While driving traffic to via social media you want to know how many clicks did a link get. Bit.ly helps you do just that. Bit.ly helps you create short links with tracking that you can use to share via your social channels. It’s a great data point made available for free :).
Followerwonk: What Followerwonk does amazingly well is analyze your Twitter followers, compare them and search through bios. This is fantastic when building and segmenting your Twitter base. Identify the right folks to communicate with, find people you do not already talk to and get your word out at better and a faster rate. Followerwonk, offers a ton of other features like tracking and sorting for a price which your can test first and then decide on getting. But we’d totally recommend the free version if you choose to not opt for the paid one.
Klout: One of the most famous tools on the list. The Klout score has been a well monitored measure of a brands social media performance. The new avatar of Klout allows you to do much more than just track your score. You can find relevant content and post it directly from their interface.
That’s all folks! We hope you benefit from these tools. If you’re using a tool that has helped you manage your Social Media Channels, then do share the details in the comments section below.
