Unless you've been stuck under a rock for the last 10 years, digital marketing for your business means prioritizing social media marketing. It allows you to promote your
brand and products through social media sites, such as Facebook,
Twitter, and LinkedIn. Getting a
social media marketing campaign to deliver sales requires special
skills, in-depth analysis, and highly specialized social media
management tools. There is no magic trick in digital marketing, just
plain old skills and tools, the same as any other marketing avenue. This blog post details eight of the best social media management tools that I either use or found highly beneficial.
1) TweetDeck
If you a brand focused on the US market, then Twitter should be a priority.
Tweetdeck is a powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing and engagement.
This social media management tool extends the (negligible) reporting
capabilities, similar to Tweepi below, so you can build custom timelines, keep track of lists, searches and activity - all in one place. I especially like how you can create searches that to track topics, events and hashtags. It has some nice sharable features that allow for team access, and very important, without sharing your password. Other features worth mentioning are scheduling tweets, alerts, filtered searches and fairly robust export cabilities. Again, if you tweet, you should be using TweetDeck.
2) Tweepi
Very similiar to TweetDeck, if you prioritize Twitter then this is yet another tool you could benefit from,
Tweepi.
This social media management tool extends the (negligible) reporting
capabilities of a Twitter account so you can analyze your hits and
misses from your digital marketing campaign. Tweepi has a free plan and
two paid plans. Before you spend any of your hard-earned income,
however, it is worth remembering that Twitter’s market share seems to be
in freefall at the moment, and focusing all of your digital marketing
there is probably a mistake. As Tweepi only allows you to manage your
Twitter account, the value of its service is closely tied to Twitter’s
performance.
3) Hootsuite
OK, enough of Twitter only tools. Here's one that is more expansive for those that use Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. - in addition to Twitter. You might say you couldn’t give a hoot what people are writing on the
web about your business, but if reputation management is a priority for
you, you might need
Hootsuite.
This social media management tool is all about monitoring what others
say about your company and your products. Bad reviews may arise from
faulty products or poor customer service, from blackmailing clients who
want something for nothing or from sneaky rivals. Whatever causes
negative comments about your business, you need to identify and deal
with it, because such comments can get indexed by search engines and
appear on results pages when people are searching for your products or
services. On the positive side, good reviews are worth more than the
most expensive advertising, and you should locate them and draw the
public’s attention to them. On top of this monitoring capability,
Hootsuite also includes message scheduling and analytical tools.
Hootsuite monitors 35 social media outlets for you, including Facebook,
Twitter, and Google+. You can get a 30-day free trial of the Pro price
plan, which costs US $9.99 per month thereafter. The Small Business Plan
costs US $49 per month, and there is a 30-day free trial for that, too.
4) Buffer
Buffer, which competes with Hootsuite, is one I'm considering as replacement option. It has the message scheduling capabilities of Hootsuite, CoSchedule and the
analytical tools of Crowdbooster. Downside, it is a lot more expensive
than the combination of both CoSchedule and Crowdbooster. The cheapest
Buffer plan costs US $50 per month. You can get a free trial for seven
days, so that facility will help you decide whether it is worth paying
for this social media management tool or whether you can get by with the
cheaper combination of CoSchedule and Crowdbooster. The Buffer website
has a blog with some handy tips on social media marketing. If you decide
not to subscribe to their services, you can still benefit from the
advice of the company’s experts by checking the new posts on the blog.
5) CoSchedule
Another social media management tool that you might consider using is
CoSchedule.
The aim of this tool is to help you time publicity for the content you
post on your website or other blogs. Seems like a great tool for any entertainment company, e.g. Disney, Paramount, Warner Brothers, etc. When you write a new post, you get
CoSchedule to post messages about it on social media sites. You might
not want every outlet to display messages about that post all at once,
so you can adjust the schedule of your social media postings to draw the
attention of your followers on different platforms on different days.
This will enable you to monitor traffic and work out which social media
site draws in better customers. This is a stand-alone application, but
it can also integrate with WordPress. The pricing for this social media
marketing tool is US $10 per month, per WordPress blog. If you pay up
front for a year, you get a US $20 discount.
6) Crowdbooster
Analyzing the value of your social media marketing efforts can be
difficult. It is not always easy to track which visitors were driven to
your site by which social media outlet.
Crowdbooster
aims to fill that knowledge gap. This social media management tool
analyzes and reports on your social media marketing and tries to marry
the sales results to each digital marketing campaign. This information
will help you understand where your markets are and what methods are
best at reaching them and getting them to follow through a visit with a
purchase. Crowdbooster only monitors marketing on Facebook and Twitter.
It has a range of plans that start at US $9 per month and go up to US
$119 per month.
7) IFTTT
This social media management tool is pronounced like “gift” without
the “g.” This is an acronym that stands for “if this, then that.” That
phrase is a standard construct in programming, so the name of the
service and its minimal use of presentation show that this social media
management tool is run by very techie geniuses. The
IFTTT
methodology is based around a “recipe,” which is the “if this, then
that” statement, where “this” is a trigger and “that” is an action. Your
social media messages will be posted if a given condition is met. For
instance, creating a new blog post can act as a trigger to send out
social media messages about that blog post.
8) SocialFlow
The key feature of the
SocialFlow
social media management tool is that it can monitor the posts and
comments of your followers on LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.
This enables digital marketers to tailor content to the current
interests of followers and then schedule its release and promotion to
feed into current conversations. Promotion takes the forms of both
messaging and paid advertising. This social media management tool
includes both scheduling and analysis tools.
Social media marketing management
Social media is a complicated field, and the novice
practitioner should gain a thorough understanding of the topic before
investing in complicated social media management tools. Fortunately,
most of the companies offering these tools also have blogs on their
sites that explain the methodology and purpose of social media
marketing. Many aren't terribly expensive either. Makes trial and error not such a huge undertaking. Take time to visit these blogs, and get to understand the
techniques this marketing channel requires by visiting each of the sites
in this review. Once you feel comfortable with the topic, you will be
better able to assess which of these tools would suit your marketing
strategy. Don't forget to take advantage of the free trials so you can get the best
returns for your money!
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