Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are quickly becoming a big part of nearly every business’ marketing strategy. While they make a great addition to every company’s toolbox, it can be difficult to manage multiple accounts across multiple platforms and quantify the results into something more meaningful than the number of retweets or likes that a post received. Here are 5 tools to make your social media efforts more productive, efficient, and trackable.
HootSuite: HootSuite is one of the most popular and powerful social media tools out there because it allows you to manage your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and FourSquare accounts all in one place. The app also provides in-depth customizable analytics reports on all your profiles, allows your entire team to access the accounts, and lets you schedule updates for more optimal times. If you are going to only use one social media tool, this is the one to try.
SproutSocial: SproutSocial is the main competitor of HootSuite and offers a more powerful management dashboard that is especially helpful for marketers managing many different profiles. The app allows you to publish posts to multiple profiles, gives you in-depth analytics on your efforts, helps you find highly targeted customers, gives you full control over your team’s permissions, track keywords and trends, and measures your “customer engagement.”
Wildfire: Wildfire is a quickly growing social media suite that recently became part of Google. It allows you to manage and design all your social media pages, publish and schedule messages, create and manage social media ads, and monitor their comprehensive analytics. What really makes Wildfire stand out, however, is their Promotions platform. Wildfire allows you to easily launch a sweepstakes, coupon, contest, quiz, trivia, or group deals to generate word-of-mouth, capture new leads, and ultimately sell more products. The app gives you a ton of control over the promotion and branding but is very easy to set up and monitor.
Social Mention: Social Mention is a very simple tool that allows you to see who is talking about you and your company. Simply type in the name and Social Mention will bring up a full dashboard of stats. See how strong your social media message is, see the ratio of positive to negative mentions, see who is talking about your brand repeatedly, the range of your influence, top keywords your name is associated with, and see all of the pages and profiles on which you are being mentioned.
Klout: Klout is a very popular tool that allows you to measure your “influence.” Klout assigns your brand a Klout Score based on an algorithm that involves more than 400 different signals from seven different networks. Among them are your Facebook mentions, likes, comments, subscribers, wall posts, and friends, your Twitter mentions, re-tweets, list memberships, and replies, your Google+ comments, +1s, and reshares, your LinkedIn title, connections, recommendations, and comments, and foursquare, Klout, and Wikipedia power. When using social media, it can be hard to quantify how much success you are having but the Klout Score might be a great way to quantify how much reach and influence you have.
