Social media is popular among people of all ages, from the young to the elderly. For most people, social media is usually for personal use. However, there’s recently been a shift as social cause organizations, professional bodies, politicians, and businesses use social platforms to promote their businesses/causes and engage their audiences.
The Problem With Separate Social Media Accounts
At times, it can be challenging to use the primary social media channels, and it can be inefficient for small businesses for the following reasons:
- Inadequate staffing; thus, there isn’t a team or someone solely dedicated to managing social media activities.
- Not having enough time to have accounts on multiple platforms—Google, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook—to post content and engage your target audience.
Managing Social Media Platforms
Fortunately, the challenge doesn’t have a social media account. The real challenge is knowing how to manage the content you post effectively and how to engage your audience across multiple platforms. This is why social media management tools were invented.
Like any other aspect of your Business, you must analyze your performance to manage your online reach effectively.
Social media tools or dashboards refer to sites that let you see the essential information and metrics from different social media accounts in one place. This eradicates the need to manually sign in to every account to post or get updates.
Main Features Of Dashboards
- Tracking: Most social media tools have the search function that allows users to narrow down on the trending topics in your niche and what people say about your company or brand. Social media tools also help businesses know who is talking about them and what they say.
- Post scheduling: When using the primary social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, there are no options for scheduling posts since these sites operate in real-time. Social media tools have a feature that allows users to schedule up to ten posts. These tools sometimes allow one to post this content across multiple platforms simultaneously.
- Collaboration: Social media tools allow users to create teams to work together from one dashboard. Users can spell out the roles and allocate duties to different members, and the details can be logged in to increase the effectiveness of social media management.
- Analytics: Many social media tools have analytics of activities within your network, like how many shares your post got, the posts that led to conversions, the influencers in your niche, and the engagement with various posts. The primary social media platforms don’t offer this kind of analytics.
6 Most Popular Social Media Tools
Now that you have an understanding of what social media tools are, let’s go over the most popular social media tools that can help you with your social media marketing:
1. Tweetdeck
Twitter owns this social media tool, and it only accommodates Twitter accounts. It is popular because it allows users to create columns to manage separate Twitter accounts, monitor trending topics, hashtags, and events, and customize timelines in a single interface.
The platform allows one to share the account with your team to manage your business profile effectively. Tweetdeck is user-friendly and very handy for managing your Twitter business account.
2. Hootsuite
This social media tool is big in terms of functionalities. Hootsuite has an interface that’s similar to Tweetdeck. The main difference is that with Hootsuite, users can manage various social media accounts, including Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.
The platform also provides social media listening services to track what your target audience is saying about your brand so that you can engage them. The site provides excellent analytics and lets team members collaborate.
The platform has a pro and free plan. Features such as social media listening, advanced analytics, and collaboration are only available on the pro plan. Nevertheless, the free plan is fully packed, allowing one to add up to three different social media accounts; this is pretty good for small enterprises.
3. Buffer
This website application helps users manage their social media platforms by offering a means to post the same thing across multiple social media platforms simultaneously. Buffer also allows users to schedule posts on their social media accounts.
Therefore, users can create content and upload it to the platform to handle the posting while you focus on other essential things. The best thing about this tool is that it’s completely free!
4. Bitly
Mentioning Bitly when discussing social media tools may seem out of place. Bitly is a platform that allows users to shorten URLs. This platform allows companies to brand their links using custom links and short domains.
Companies can use their brand name as part of the shortened URL. Additionally, the site offers users engagement statistics and link analysis of how many individuals have clicked on the link across multiple platforms.
The platform’s most useful function is that it helps users create cleaner and shorter URLs, particularly if you want to insert these links on social media platforms such as Twitter which has a 140-character limit.
5. Social Mention
This search and analysis site can pull together user-generated content from multiple social sites into one platform. Social Mention allows users to monitor and measure what social media users are saying about your brand or company and trending topics in your niche across all social channels.
The platform tracks over one hundred social media platforms, including Google, Digg, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. This tool is popular in social media marketing since it has in-depth assessment capabilities, is free, and is an excellent tool for digital reputation management.
6. Topsy
This is an excellent tool for assessing brands and key terms. The site’s services include Social Trends analysis and Social Analytics.
Topsy is a real-time search engine for socially shared content and public social posts, mainly on Google+ and Twitter. The platform offers access metrics for terms mentioned on Twitter through its free analytics service (analytics.topsy.com), where users can contrast up to three terms for content in the past month, week, day, or hour.
The site announced in September 2013 that it’d include all public tweets posted on Twitter for search and analysis. The platform offers both pro and free versions.