No matter how effective our previous social media tools were, they did not solve the issues of needing proxies, managing multiple accounts, and mixing up the accounts so they don’t look like blatant self-promotion. Tools are helpful, but not an end-all solution with how quickly the social media marketing industry evolves.
SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT TOOLS
HOOTSUITE
HootSuite is the most popular third-party application for Twitter, Hootsuite allows you to send and read tweets, schedule them for later, organize followers by theme, create lists of Twitter users without actually following them (great for competition), and you can send to other applications like Facebook and LinkedIn as well. The basic version is free. Collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard, launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audiences, and distribute targeted messages, provide custom reports using the comprehensive social analytics tools for measurement.
HOW HOOTSUITE HELPS WITH SOCIAL MEDIA
Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social media channels through one dashboard. It allows you to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard, launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audiences, distribute targeted messages, and provide custom reports using the comprehensive social analytics tools for measurement.
SETTING UP YOUR DASHBOARD
Create your own dashboard and fill it with columns containing the tweets of interest to you. Tabs allow you to group and organize all your social media content so you can easily browse through and find what you need. You can organize your tabs. You can streamline the information flow of your networks into streams. Streams are just a column of information that helps you easily monitor social media. You can add up to 10 streams for tabs and have multiple social media profile streams under one tab. Go to your streams account and add your social networks. You can add multiple profile accounts with the following stream ideas:
- Lists
- Search Results
- Your tweets
- Tweets mentioning you
- Sent Tweets
- Direct Messages
- Important industry trends or topics by #hashtag
- Special events you plan to attend or at which you’ll be speaking
- Competition: Private list for their accounts
NAVIGATING YOUR SOCIAL PROFILE
Member overview page you can view your profile, organizations you belong to, and the social networks you belong to. You can edit your profile
HOOTSUITE MOBILE
HootSuite Mobile App enables you to take social media with you on the go. Online conversations happen quickly and they don’t stop when you get away from your desk. When using the Hootsuite dashboard from a mobile device, your existing tabs and streams are automatically imported to your device. You can also auto-schedule your messages to publish at optimal devices on the mobile dashboard. You can respond to messages, view stats, and grow your audience.
SOCIAL LISTENING
You can monitor social networks for messages relevant to your brand by using the search and keyword streams functionality to monitor your brand, industry, and competition. Use streams to monitor your brand, industry, and competitors. Keyword streams allow you to monitor up to 3 keywords. Use search to monitor relative terms and hashtags. You should use lists in HootSuite also to better organize them into groups.
Creating Job Searches
You can add a stream for LinkedIn Jobs into a stream as well. Hootsuite easily integrates with over 100 apps including Gmail, Instagram, YouTube and Evernote in the App Directory.
Publishing Messages
Easily access compose box at the top of your dashboard. Select one or multiple channels to publish at once. Use profile favoriting and pinning to save even more time. You can retweet two ways but it is better to do the old school method. Go to preferences in settings and deselect use Twitter Web Retweets. Type dm and a space to send direct messages. Making your customers feel acknowledged and appreciated is one of the key wasy to engage customers and build your online brand.
Using Plugin Aps
Send social media content to third-party applications. You can attach images by selecting the paper clip icon. Be sure to shorten links. You can use hoot.ly and ow.li. Use schedule tweets and auto schedule to optimize your posts for best reach.
Using the Hootlet
Using the Hootlet chrome extension you can find targeted content using Google, Google Maps and Yelp and reply or retweet right from your browser window. You can edit those options in your extension options. Allows you to easily share content over your social networks without leaving the page you’re on.
Utilzing the Hootfeed
Enhances your engagement at conferences. Go to hootsuite.com/hootfeed to track media reactions for amplification. The hot feed allows for more interaction with your audience.
Hootsuite Collaboration
Add Hootsuite Conversations for Collaboration. Organize your team into marketing, sales, etc. You can also disable social organization if you are an enterprise. Approved and client messaging makes this feature valuable. Teams and organizations can communicate without ever leaving the dashboard. You can also share your team’s streams to see which tweets need addressing. Hootsuite drafting allows you to create a bank of preapproved messaging to respond to common questions. You can also share your drafts with your team. Drafts allow you to cut down on customer service and allow for consistent messaging in your teams workflow.
Ow.ly Analytics
Used to measure engagement with your shared links over time. Owly Clicks Summary analytics of your twitter interactions. The ow.ly link shortener provides in-depth analytics for your links. Set up continuous reports for your twitter accounts to be updated daily. Ow.ly analytics provide instant insight into acc0unt activity.
Twitter and Facebook Reports
Hootsuite offers template reports for Twitter and Facebook analytics. Templates can be customized by account and data range. Export reports as a .csv or a PDF document.
Advance practices with Hootsuite Mobile
Hootsuite Mobile lets you assign tweets to team members. You can assign messages from shared streams to your team and team members, easily see assigned messages on mobile and web browsers, and continue collaboration and audience engagement on the go.
Advanced Listening with Hootsuite Pro
Advanced search helps you narrow your focus such as social media -strategy. Setting up advanced streams can help customer service teams find the right information and solve issues quickly. Advanced search tactics uses Twitter search operators to fine-tune your search query. You can filter for a specific timeline such as #socialmedia since:2014-05-01. You can also search for questions. You can do geosearch as well. You can see past examples of query search. Archive space is limited, so plant to export regularly.
Filtering messages in the stream
You can filter your streams by keyword and by Klout. Filter it by Klout score, or how influential someone is on social media. This helps you to identify influencers to help amplify your messages. You can also filter down to keyword questions to ensure your customers are attended to. Filtering allows you to prioritize your communications. The archiving feature allows you to archive results from a keyword search so you can refer back to your messages at a later time. Archiving allows storage and retrieval of important data. Very useful for regulated industries with security purposes.
Geosearch allows you to track reactions to events or certain areas. Allow for a targeted search within a 25km radius of your current IP address. Click what’s here from Google Maps to obtain geo-codes from Google Maps. geocode:#,30mi. Geotargeting allows you to optimize your social media efforts.
Listening tactics with the Hootsuite App
Create a separate tab for listening apps. Look at audience lifestyles to understand their interests. Use apps like Trendspotter to find trends in your industry.
Monitoring Multiple Channels
Organize streams by workflow like Marketing, Competition, Listening, Sales, etc. organize tabs by store location or individualized accounts. Organize tabs by marketing campaigns. PR & Marketing teams often set up tabs to monitor mentions of their executive teams to monitor CEO’s. The App Directory offers apps to help you gather more detailed information about your audiences such as GoPollGo and Social Bro.
Discovering your audience
Listen to what your customers are talking about. Analyze your twitter audience with socialbro. The GoPollGo app allows you to ask specific questions. Build your online community with Get Satisfaction. There are a number of social networks that are popular outside of North America. You can tune into international conversations with the App Directory now and add international apps such as Xing and Viadeo. Hootsuite auto-populates a tab when you set up a new social network by default. Create different tabs for your company by: department, location or product to monitor global brands.
Bulk Scheduling & Publisher
Save time and schedule multiple messages at once. You can enter them in a csv file and schedule up to 200 messages at a time. The format for the date is month, date, year and uses military time. Make sure links are in quotation marks.” Access your scheduled messenger by viewing publisher. You can also add RSS feeds. Bulk scheduling allows you to draft and schedule a queue of messages in advance. You can use drag and drop menus for to save time. You have past messages as well. The Publisher allows you to edit and view all of your scheduled messages from various accounts. How may this be helpful if you’re managing accounts for multiple clients? You can filter messages by the social network. You can utilize require approval from a manager to approve messages.
Suggested Content
Brings you more curation and targeted content for your topics based on your sharing and curation habits. Discover rich and engaging content with your fans to share on social media. Discover rich and engaging content to read with your fans and followers. You need to choose twitter profiles to generate suggestions, choose the profiles where content will go. Review suggestions, select or replace and click schedule to complete.
Using RSS Feeds
Add RSS Feed in settings to rss/atom and add that feed from bloggers.
Instead, using the Twitter Tab for the Facebook app to link your tweets to your Facebook page. Incredible curation tools guide via @scoopit to spread social messages, monitor conversations and track results. In the beginning, I started with the ‘Quick Start’ guide. At the Help Desk, you’ll find a library of tutorials for learning about features or solving problems, and a Community Help Forum to exchange with other HootSuite fans. If you wish to add more social accounts and news feeds, you need a Pro plan. Accented Spanish characters like ñ and ü cause issues with the upload process. In some instances, the upload would return 500 Internal Errors when using the Bulk Scheduling feature of HootSuite.
MARKETMESUITE
With MarketMeSuite, you can build client relationships and organic, targeted leads very quickly. It can update Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools rapidly and lets you manage multiple apps, schedule posts and allows multiple users to login at any time.
VOCUS
This is actually more than just a social media management tool. It’s a tool that
allows you to integrate search, social, email and publicity into on all-encompassing
dashboard.
WILDFIRE
This web application, now part of Google, helps you to integrate your traditional promotions such as sweepstakes, contests and giveaways with interactive sites
such as Facebook and Twitter.
SPROUT SOCIAL
Another organizing tool, Sprout Social manages multiple social networks
from one dashboard, allowing you to optimize your outreach in each channel, identify
people interested in your brand and convert them to loyal consumers.
CROWDBOOSTER
The beauty of Crowdbooster is that it lets you manage your social media profiles while also providing suggestions on how to improve your engagement and
interaction. This is perfect for the businessperson on-the-go who doesn’t have much
time to analyze data and derive insights of their own.
TweetDeck Social media dashboard application for management of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Pricing is free and is used by anyone. Social media dashboard application for management of Twitter and Facebook along with MySpace and LinkedIn. Pricing is free. Customer base: anyone, Like HootSuite, TweetDeck provides a way to track many of your social media channels on one dashboard. It can be a time-saver and a productivity-enhancer, assuming you’re not easily distracted.
SENDIBLE
This social media management tool allows you to publish across multiple
platforms while also monitoring your brand mentions across the social web.
VIRAL HEAT
This analytics-based social listening tool allows you to see each mention of
your brand along with analytics about it. Viral Heat also shows you overall trends concerning your brand.
CONVERSOCIAL
Meant for small- to medium-sized businesses, Conversocial lets you set up automatic moderation to delete or flag posts based on keywords, drives all comments to your email inbox, sets up a team workflow and provides limited analytics.
EXACTTARGET
ExactTarget’s social media management platform is perfect for companies
who have multiple people contributing to their social media campaigns. In addition to
organizing and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook pages, it allows you to assign
Tweet this e-book to your friends by clicking here. updates and social streams to members of your team based either on their expertise or who is “on duty” at a certain time.
THIS MOMENT
ThisMoment is the only software platform that helps brands build and
manage immersive, high-engagement brand experiences across the web, social and
mobile simultaneously.
AWARENESS of SOCIAL MARKETING HUB
This platform is ideal for larger social media campaigns with multiple people monitoring and executing the program. In addition to aggregating social network information, the Hub allows marketers to set up workflows in order to coordinate efforts across a marketing team.
EXPION
Built with multiple-location business or franchises in mind, Expion allows corporate offices to oversee and manage each of their locations’ individual social media
accounts while still allowing store managers or franchisees to have some control over
the account. This helps brands maintain continuity across locations while still allowing
for regional-based promotions or content relevant only to the local stores.
SYNCAPSE SOCIALTALK
Perfect for mid-sized businesses, this tool helps you control
your presence across different platforms, manage multiple social media accounts from
one platform, establish multiple user access levels, and monitor incoming traffic.
POSTLING
Designed for small businesses, Postling helps organize and update your social media accounts, alerts you when your accounts are active, and searches Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and more to see who is talking about your brand.
NUTSHELLMAIL
If you’re easily distracted, NutshellMail may be the tool for you. This tool,
much like TweetDeck, helps you track all of your social media channels, but instead of
constant updates, sends you a single email per day describing your accounts’ activity.
MEDIAFUNNEL
This platform aggregates, manages and monitors your social media activity, with a focus on hard numbers and measurable outcomes. They also have a few
cool additional features including their Tweet-to-Lead tool, which allows you to turn all
tweets into new Salesforce leads and a mobile component that allows you to receive
SMS updates or even text updates to your accounts.
SPROUTLOUD
This platform helps manage brands and promote marketing messages at
the local level with a web-based Marketing Resource Management solution. Their solutions are easily adaptable for any type of local network – sales channels, franchises, retailers, dealer networks, VAR Programs, distributed employees/offices, affiliates and
more.
SOCIALBAKERS
Socialbakers is a user friendly social media analytics platform which provides a leading global solution that allows brands to measure, compare, and contrast
the success of their social media campaigns with competitive intelligence.
VENTIVE
This is a powerful suite of marketing, sales, social media management, and
collaboration tools that provide businesses and individuals with everything they need to
Tweet this e-book to your friends by clicking here. build their brands online. No third-party plugins or applications are necessary. Venntive is
the most comprehensive business solution on the market.