These days, businesses are opening up their social media presence to seize the immense opportunities to expand their brand influence and engage customers.
What emerges as the bigger challenge for marketers, however, is keeping their Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts active.
Good thing, there’s plenty of social media management tools that are available at your disposal and use to keep posts flowing.
Social Media Marketing Explored
It’s pretty obvious why entrepreneurs add social media marketing as part of their integrated marketing communication efforts. Not only it’s less costly to invest money into social media marketing than advertising, the added benefits include gaining more customers engaged in real-time and generating new leads.
The actual work of social media marketing involve ensuring that your startup or enterprise is constantly looped in on relevant conversations and manage your conversations. There is also the aspects of setting a benchmark and analyzing the metrics of audience reach and conversion rates.
Optimizing Social Media with these Tools
After looking into what social media marketing gurus are using to manage their multiple accounts, we’ve only selected ten. Here they are:
Buffer
A very popular choice by social media managers, Buffer helps keep a consistent social media schedule all week long without ever having to micromanage the delivery times.
Acting more like a virtual queue, Buffer lets social media managers fill your social networking presence pages with content. This tool also helps systematically post the content throughout the day. With Buffer, you can also analyze how your brand fare in engaging and reaching your audience through posts.
HootSuite
Among other more popular social media management tools around, Hootsuite is well-loved by brands with social networking presence. With this tool, collaboration among social media managers is a breeze when executing brand campaigns across social media.
Hootsuite provides one web-based dashboard to to allow marketers to manage social media pages, track conversions and measure campaign outcomes in the web or mobile devices. Managers can avail of Hootsuite’s free, pro or enterprise options. The paid versions give more flexibility to the features offered.
TweetDeck
Here’s a social media management solution that comes with powerful filters to help you focus on what matters in your Twitter social media management tasks.
Available for Chrome, Windows and Mac desktop browsers, TweetDeck’s other benefits for marketers include the ability to schedule tweets and receive notification alerts so you are abreast of you and your followers’ Twitter activities.
TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter and had recently shut down its mobile apps in order to focus on the web and desktop platforms.
SproutSocial
Social businesses looking for a facility to manage and engage audiences through their social media presence can find some help with SproutSocial.
Through a single stream inbox, you’ll sure never again miss a message, post content, and collaborate and schedule messages across your social media presence.
SproutSocial also lets you perform social media monitoring. Through the analytics that it provide, SproutSocial helps managers visualize important metrics.
CrowdBooster
To help measure your brand’s social performance, here comes a handy social media management tool called CrowdBooster.
Offering a variety of paid plans depending on the number of accounts that you manage, CrowdBooster gives marketers plenty of features to help review which content marketing efforts are working best and the ones that need improvement.
ArgyleSocial
Like CrowdBooster that helps discover the performance of your B2B marketing content on social media sites, but ArgyleSocial’s difference is that it quantifies the value of your content efforts in social media.
ArgyleSocial has a feature that allows marketers to merge social data with sales and marketing figures.This valuation of content efforts helps in optimizing content in order to build stronger relationships with social media actions.
SocialOomph
A paid and free productivity social media management tool with a slew of helpful features useful in updating and scheduling tweets, tracking relevant keywords, viewing mentions and retweets.
There are also a Direct Message (DM) inbox cleanup, auto-follow and auto-DM features for new followers. Plus, SocialOomph also has an option that lets you auto-follow any new follower of your brand on Twitter.
SocialFlow
With its full suite of features that lets you watch real-time conversations on social media, you can now predict the best times to publish and post content with the ability to translate revenue per customer.
Big known corporations like Mashable and National Geographic (as of this writing) use this tool because it provides marketers with social signal data, which are helpful in keeping marketers informed with the best opportunities where and when to implement a paid Twitter and Facebook strategies.
SocialBro
When it comes to helping entrepreneurs better manage customer engagement in Twitter, SocialBro comes to the rescue. It’s a tool that social media managers can use to explore your community and identify key influencers.
SocialBro also lets you determine when the best time to tweet by analyzing not only your followers’ timelines but that of your competitors as well.
By knowing the best time to tweet your content, you seize the opportunity to reach the maximum amount of followers and benefit from more retweets and replies.
SocialMention
This tool, which is very helpful for organizations with unique brand or company names, gives you a list of all mentions of your name online, including how you are rated for the type of mention you obtain.
For reputation management purposes, SocialMention is very helpful since it pulls from a vast array of resources.
In Closing
Social media marketing may appear as a brand new branch of marketing but the difference lies in the type of platform used, which is the social web. Social networking channels like Facebook, Twitter, Linked, Pinterest and Instagram have transformed the way businesses operate with tons of advantages and disadvantages.
Engagement has become more real-time through social media. The challenge then is keeping abreast with real time conversation and messaging with customers and prospects. But the serious disadvantage is that your brand reputation can quickly turn into ruins when customer backlash are unaddressed.
Whether you are a small or large enterprise, use these social media management tools to give you extra valuable time and resources to manage your other core processes. In addition, you don’t have to lose the best opportunities to reach out to your customers and respond when issues arise.
