We all know that social media is a fantastic way to market your business and boost your brand power and social media management tools play an important role in managing your social media marketing.
When you start marketing your business through various social media outlets, it’s very important to keep up with everything so that you can gauge just how effective your marketing strategies are.
To help keep you on track and stop you from being overwhelmed by your social media marketing efforts, here is a list of the best social media management tools that you can use on a daily basis. But before we do; let’s talk about some popular social media myths.
Popular social media myths
For brands, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people create content for the social Web on a daily basis. Your customers have been using it for a long time. Your competitors have embraced it.
If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it should be.
But there are some recurring fallacies and misconceptions out there. Many companies are finding that these tools don’t live up to the hype, especially small businesses.
There are a lot of challenges that aren’t immediately apparent. Are you considering Twitter, Facebook, et al. as part of your marketing plan?
Before you jump in, keep these myths in mind:
Social media is cheap or free. Yes, many social media management tools are free to use, including Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, the social network building tool Ning, and content aggregators like StumbleUpon and Digg.
There are many free blogging tools, too, like WordPress, Blogger, FriendFeed, and Twitter. But incorporating them into a corporate marketing program requires time, skill, and money.
You can make a big splash really quickly. Sure, sometimes this happens. Social media is great if you’re already a star, but there isn’t any such thing as an overnight sensation.
For example, tweets can drive traffic to articles, Web sites, Facebook pages, contests, apps, videos, etc.
— this is easier if your audience already cares about your brand or if you have a truly original product or idea that excites people to the extent that they want to share with their friends.
But it takes a lot of time and dedication to keep your content fresh.
You need to be on all the big sites. Most brands that have succeeded with social media sites focus on just a few of them. Just because the media says it’s cool to tweet doesn’t mean it has anything to do with your business.
If you plan to frequent social networks, don’t spread yourself too thin. The companies that choose their weapons wisely and give it their all are the ones that succeed in the social space.
If you create something that’s great, people will find it. How’s that supposed to happen? Unless you can drive traffic to your social media effort, it’s akin to a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it.
Many tools can drive traffic, including Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, blogs, and SEO, but word of mouth trumps them all
— one friend telling another, “Hey, check this out!” is very powerful.
It’s for kids. Contrary to the perception that social media is for tweens, teens, and 20-somethings, older demographics are rapidly evolving into this space.
According to an analysis by iStrategyLabs, Facebook experienced 276% growth in users aged 35-54 in 2009 and is its fastest growing segment.
You can’t build quality relationships online. The thinking on this goes that it’s a waste of time connect with people online that you don’t know in real life
— that it’s a pointless exercise that doesn’t lead to lasting relationships with your brand. It’s actually quite the opposite:
Social media enables you to be face to face with your target audience. Even if they don’t turn into paying customers, you still gain valuable insight into what they think and what they react to.
It gives away content and ideas you should be charging for. Simply put: The more you give, the more you receive in social media.
You need to let go of the idea that all the content you produce is proprietary, engage with your audience, and encourage them to share what you’ve created.
It’s a fad. The drumbeat about social media has become deafening. Yet many marketers remain skeptical, hesitating to expand budgets and expend resources on a craze.
But social media is a fundamental shift in communication — it isn’t just a new set of tools, but a new sphere of networking, communicating, living, and organizing. It has become intertwined in our lifestyles, so it’s here to stay.
Anyone can do it. It sure sounds that way, doesn’t it? There are a lot of people, from whiz kids to more experienced marketers, who claim to be social media experts.
Some even portray themselves as gurus. But how many of them have created successful social media initiatives for clients?
To be effective, a campaign must integrate social elements into all aspects of marketing, including advertising, digital, and PR.
The theory is no match for experience, and the best social media marketers now have years of experience incorporating interactivity, forums, viral video, apps, social networks, blogs, user-generated content, and contests into the marketing mix.
Here is a list of best social media management tools:
HootSuite
HootSuite is an amazing free online tool that allows you to manage several social media profiles, set up scheduled updates, monitor keywords and analyze statistics.
You can also check and reply to Twitter Lists, Direct Mentions, saved searches and so much more.
It’s also available as a mobile app, giving you an easy way to pre-schedule your social updates on the go. There is also a paid version available.
Buffer
User-friendly and clean, Buffer is great for staggering content throughout the day across multiple social platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.
If you’re looking for a simple and efficient management app for scheduling updates, helping you save time on administrating your networks, Buffer can definitely help.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management tool created to help businesses grow their social media presence. It has engagement, publishing, and analytics integrated into it.
Team collaboration and live activity feed are one of the best features for agencies where you have multiple team member who contributes and manage social media marketing.
Sprout makes it easy for your entire team to respond to customers on social through inbox feature.
S3Engage
This is a single tool that takes care of your content discovery, curation, publishing, scheduling, and automation.
It can also drive more traffic to your site, grow your fan engagement and save you time.
S3Engage can help you find all the content you need in one place. Easily pull popular viral articles, videos from YouTube, images, and status updates from popular Facebook fan pages.
By using the best social media management tools for marketing, you will have more time to focus on crucial matters in your business and also achieve a much wider reach across various social platforms.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is an excellent platform for brands to manage social networks. A simple, efficient, all-in-one approach makes TweetDeck very useful for getting updates out quickly to some locations.
TweetDeck supports Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, GoogleBuzz, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, giving a user easy access to all of the major networks.
Users can send out status updates to any or all of these at once, allowing unified messages to be spread in a single step, without the potential to forget one.
However, it does have its limitations. Very heavy traffic to multiple accounts can slow down its efficiency, making it more of a startup and middleweight tool than a long-term solution.
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
Mention
In order to succeed in your marketing efforts, you also need to safeguard your reputation on social sites. These require regular monitoring of comments and posts concerning your company.
Mention is very effective in doing just that. This beneficial tool is helpful in capturing any ‘mentions’ of your company across various social platforms.
You will easily identify any negative comments, thus enabling you to take appropriate action to correct the negative image. Furthermore, identifying the mentions concerning your business will give you a clear picture of your company’s reach through your marketing efforts.
This will help in deciding the best and most effective marketing strategies to employ on social media.
Mention also has various control settings for identifying specific sources for monitoring. This means that you can opt to identify mentions within Facebook only and not from any of the other social sites.
However, the sources that are turned off can still be monitored through the spam folder – just in case you still need to assess activity on other social sites.
SocioAdvocacy
Advocate is a great asset to any company since it maximizes on the social connections of the employees. The combined reach through employees’ personal profiles is usually more than the company’s social media profile.
Therefore, having a tool that takes advantage of this wider exposure will substantially multiply your social media marketing efforts.
Advocate is simply installed as a browser plugin through which employees can get content recommendations from the marketing team.
The marketing team can also evaluate the accumulated engagement created by the shared content by each employee. Moreover, employees can also give recommendations to the marketing team through Advocate or even share content with one another.
CoSchedule
Bring entire marketing strategy under one roof with CoSchedule, one of the best marketing calendars for everything you need organized.
It has a content calendar, bulk posting, team collaboration and smart scheduling with content reuse to fill the gap. It shares your best social updates multiple times at an optimal posting frequency.
Best analytics to gain powerful insight into your content’s organic reach with individual stats for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest all in one place.
Spredfast
Spredfast is one of the Enterprise social media management systems that allow you to manage, monitor and measure for voices across all the channels that exist through social media. There is an additional white label option for agencies.
It provides a host of other products and services to streamline your social marketing and make your social strategy smarter.
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