How to Find the Right Tools to Manage Social Media for Business

Creating a social media campaign to promote your business is a great start! Then comes the work of managing it effectively. Trawl through virtually any SME FaceBook pages and it’s likely that you’ll find quite a few languishing between online life and death. Normally there’s a great opening splash, then the posts fall off, until activity ceases completely. If this sounds familiar, then you might benefit from some help with your social media posts.

Because lots of businesses are having the same problem, there’s lots of innovative help out there. In fact it’s a highly competitive space with numerous offerings trying to hit the top spot. We’ve taken a look at the range of software tools that provide support with delivering your social media campaign effectively. Rather than trying to find ‘the best’; here’s our guide to the different kinds of tools available.

1. Want a Scheduling Tool?

For some businesses, the perfect tool is one that helps you to schedule posts to the main social media platforms in advance. This shifts the task from being daily, to weekly, monthly or quarterly, making it easier to manage. If this is the kind of help you’re looking for QUU or Hootsuite are the perfect choice. They’ll also offer content suggestions, and image searches.

2. Want a Team Involved in Your Social Media Campaign?

If you have a team of people delivering social media, you’ll need a social media management tool. This allows for multiple accounts, and multiple participants. Drafts can be shared, and signed off before being scheduled. Many management tools will also suggest content and appropriate imagery as well. If this sounds like a dream come true, you should take a look at what ContentCal, Oktopost, and Sprout Social are offering.

3. Want to Know When’s the Post Time to Post?

SocialFlow lets you know when your followers are most likely to be active, or to engage with you on your platforms of choice. It does this by providing users with data and stats to help grow your understanding of when and how consumers want to engage. You’re able to constantly assess which of your posts are working best, and then grow your impact by doing more of that.

4. Want Great Visuals that are Perfectly Formatted for Each Platform?

Great visuals are key to impactful social media posts. Visage has created a tool that helps businesses design social media graphics collaboratively that will look great on your platform of choice. How? They provide a range of templates for different platforms, to ensure consistency and quality whenever, and wherever you post.

5. Want to Find Out What the Web’s Talking About?

When you’re running on dry, having the ability to find out what people like you are saying and doing online, can help to get your creative juices flowing again. Tagboard is a social listening tool. All you have to do is type in a keyword, hashtag or topic and the software will show you how it’s being talked about on all the major social media platforms.

What Do You Need to Make Your Social Media Marketing Work

Hopefully, these suggestions have already given you some ideas about how to integrate social media into your marketing routine. Before signing up to costly plans, however, it’s worth thinking about what the specific challenges are that your business might face. Here are the ones we encounter most regularly:

• Don’t know what to post
• No time in the day to post
• Don’t have any images
• Don’t get any feedback
• No-one seems to notice if we don’t post

Once you know what the block is, tackle it at source and then look for tools to help you overcome it. There are thousands out there, so there’s sure to be something that will get your social media zinging!