The use of social media marketing tools have been on the rise over the past few years, especially as social media has become a core component of an organization’s online and digital marketing strategy. Here is a list of features and requirements that the use of social media marketing has surfaced and the various tools that provide these features and functions.
Features of Social Media Management Tools
There are various types of tools that are available in the market. Some of the categories include the following:
- Tools for larger enterprises that have large social media monitoring teams
- Tools that let organizations consolidate management of their various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Messenger, Google+ and Instagram.
- Tools that let agencies work with their customers
- Social media monitoring tools that enable customer service support
- Tools that let organizations acquire more customers and grow their business
The overall goals of social media marketing and monitoring tools is to
- Manage one’s brand image
- Interact with visitors and customers on social media
- The organizations should be able to track its social media marketing and monitoring activities with an enterprise’s customer growth, revenue growth, and in general overall business growth goals.
Social media tools capabilities
General Features
- A consolidated inbox that brings in all the conversations in one place
- Social media managers can act on the messages by tagging them as leads, follow-up, respond, etc.
- Monitor using hashtags and keywords
- Complete audit trail showing an organization’s and its employees responses
- Based on the tasks identified from social listening, assign and manage tasks. For example, identifying leads is a common task and how that lead needs to be followed up with can be assigned as a task
- Publish messages across various social media platforms from one tool.
- The tools need the ability to store and manage content that is used in publishing. This can include whitepapers, images, posts, etc.
- Approval workflows that allow employees to create posts and messages and route them to managers for approval
- Have the ability to create a publishing calendar and review it
- Once posts and message are selected, the tools allow for automated scheduling
- The tools should have the detailed ability to track and report data and insights on the effects of social media marketing on the company’s image, customer growth, and increase in revenues. In a nutshell, the data analytics must be able to quantify business value.
- When monitoring activities for multiple clients, need to manage social listening of all clients from one platform
Social media analysis and reporting
- Competitive intelligence – how competitors are using social media to promote their content and brand and products
- Combine data with Google Analytics to see a bigger picture
- Predictive intelligence reports
- Get an idea how one’s social media efforts measure up against the competition
- Based on historical performance get recommendations on content
- Socialbakers provides tools to benchmark ones performance. One can compare two Facebook pages for examples to measure performance
Listing of Select Social Media tools
- https://sproutsocial.com/
- https://hootsuite.com/
- http://tweetreach.com/
- https://klout.com/
- http://socialmention.com/
- https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
- http://keyhole.co/
- https://www.brandwatch.com/
- http://buzzsumo.com/
- http://glean.info/
- http://www.digimind.com/
- http://howsociable.com/
- https://www.nuvi.com/
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