Social media marketing has become an integral part of any modern companies marketing strategy as of late. With the historic growth of companies such as Facebook and twitter it is impossible to ignore the hundreds of millions of users using social media to connect for both business and personal affairs.
With the recent unveiling of what looks like another prevalent social media network in Google+, an important question arises; how does one effectively manage and maximize all of the social media networks that are on the market today? With so many mediums and so little time how does an individual or business owner get the most out of these great resources?
There are numerous tools out there for social media networks but it is very key to choose the best ones because there are so many choices. We are going to help you filter through some of the garbage and introduce you to some of our favorites.
1. Hoot Suite – Hoot Suite is a great all-encompassing social media management tool that is free for up to 5 networks. You can manage and update your Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Ping.Fm, WordPress and Foursquare and many more accounts all from this great tool. I have to imagine that a Google+ feauture will be added in the coming months. You can post the same update across all of your networks., This saves time because you bypass the tedious process of signing in, and posting to each individuals network.
Another great feature of this tool is that you can manage all of your feeds from one dashboard. Meaning that, you can check all your messages, mentions and check-ins right from HootSuite. Also, HootSuite has a mobile app so that you can manage your profiles on the go. This is truly a time saving utility that is a must-have in our books if you wish to effectively manage your networks.
HootSuite also allows you to schedule tweets so that you don’t have to be thinking about when to post all day. Simply enter your post, set a time and voila! This is great if you are trying to also reach an international audience that maybe online when you are asleep. There are some viable alternatives to HootSuite such a Tweet Deck, which some people prefer.
2. WildFire – This is a great tool that has really caught on for big and small brands alike. Wildfire offers you the opportunity to run contests, promotions and offer discounts through using your social media channels. Their tools help you create the promo and you simply broadcast it on your social networks.
This tool really hits home for small brands and companies that are worried about the level of social media engagement between their customers in comparison to much larger brands. You can offer giveaways such as iPad where liking your business page will enter you into the drawling or simply use the promotion to capture emails and contact info in exchange for coupons to your business.
This is great for companies that wish to grow their mailing list for newsletter or product catalogs. Social media users love simple contests and this is a great way to get your foot in the door with potential customers. Then after they are in your network you can continue to update and show your new followers why connecting with you through social media is worthwhile.
3. Social Mention – this is a great tool for monitoring your brand throughout the social media space. This tool allows you to track each and every time your company name was mentioned on the internet. This way you can respond and/or react to the comments and increase your social media engagement.
Also, you can watch and listen about what is being said about your brand. These messages could help you improve on your company or products and is a great tool for constructive criticism. Google Alerts is also offers a similar service that is very good as well.
4. MyTweetSpace – offers user a unique option to customize their twitter backgrounds. This is a great opportunity to create a unified branding initiative from your website to your twitter account.
The background interface is very simple and customizable. You just make the background to your liking and upload it straight to your twitter account.
5. Twellow – is another great twitter tool which kind of acts as a yellow pages or directory for twitter. You can link your account and fill out a further profile so that other users can find you on the site.
This is also a great tool for searching for local people or other users from within your industry. Relevancy can sometimes be the key in social networking.
6. Twibes – this is another tool that is similar to twellow but with a little twist. You connect your twitter account then you input up to 10 industries that you are related to. This way people can follow whole groups and you can broaden your reach.
7. Welcome Aplet – this is an app for Facebook pages and is basically a entry page to your business presence on Facebook. You can embed videos, pictures and you logo in to this easy to use tool. Also you can ask for likes or run contests and automatically entering users into a drawing by simply click the like button on your page.
8. Bit.ly – is the best URL short in my opinion. The utility offers great analytics and click though data so that you can see exactly how many people are viewing your links that you post throughout your various networks.
9. Klout – want to see how much pull you have in the social sphere? Then check out Klout. Their algorithm takes many factors into consideration including amount of posts, amount of times people share your posts and number of followers amongst other variables to compute a rank out of 100. This gives you a rough idea of where you are and where you can improve.
10. Screenr – This is a pretty unique tool but certainly one that has its place in some niches. Screenr gives you the ability to launch a screen-cast to your twitter followers at any time. This is great for tutorials or walk throughs for industries where this would apply like SEO for instance.
These tools are great to help you get a better hold of your networks. Instead of running around like a chicken with its head cut off, you can effectively and efficiently manage, engage and listen in a fraction of the time that you are currently doing it. In the age of social media how you do it is almost as important as what you do.
Thanks Corey for sharing this list. I’ve been one of the pioneers who have been using Klout and I find it helpful in making me see just how effective I am with my tweets. I also love Social Mention as it gives me an idea of what people say about my brand. But when it comes to scheduling to my social networking accounts, I am loving my own as it helps me save time with all those posting, updating and all. Besides, what’s important is using more time to talk to your peers online so you can truly engage with them more. I wonder what you think about automating posts..?
Nice list of tools especially wildfire! Additional to this I wrote an article about How to select the right social media tools and some info about social media listening rooms combined with information from relevant Forrester reports. Might be interesting for you: http://www.theconversationmanager.com/2011/07/21/social-media-tools-listening-centers-2011/