Have you ever wondered about tools for social media strategy? Whether for your professional use or for your organization, there are many popular and free tools available to help you. These social media strategy tools can be a useful starting point if you are in charge of managing the organisation’s social media channels.
Can you use tools to aid your social media strategy? The answer you’re looking for is yes. While social media used to be considered a mistake-free playground, today it’s harder than ever to keep up with the latest trends and strategies. Luckily, thousands of tools have been developed for professionals, organizations and businesses that can help make it easier. Let’s take a closer look at some of these social media strategy tools.
Edgar
Edgar is more than just a tool for the basic scheduling of content. Although sites like Hootsuite and Buffer can be great for the general purpose of arranging posts, there’s still a concern within social media marketing in how many users are getting a look at your content. You see, social users are inundated with new content and no matter how great your post update is, only a small fraction of your followers will ever see it:
So, unlike reposting content on a blog, repurposing content on social media is actually a good thing! Fans who missed your post the first time get a chance to view it the second or third time you post it. The difference between Edgar and other content scheduling tools is that you can categorize your content, customize your settings and share some categories more than others. But, what about when you finally run out of content from a certain category? Well, Edgar starts from the beginning and will automatically re-share old content! Edgar currently works with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and it saves time and increases the amount of users viewing your content.
Mention
What for? Competitor & Industry Analysis, Execution, Evaluation
Mention is a social listening tool that shows you what’s being said on social and the wider web. By setting up alerts Mention tells you when a piece of content that would be relevant to you is shared by monitoring millions of sources from over 40 languages.
The real-time alert system is Mention’s USP but it can be utilised in different ways which makes it a very handy weapon to have for your strategy. You can connect all your different social accounts so you can react to the alerts without leaving the conversation.
Mention can also add value to the analytical side of your social strategies. It gives you understandable data of your mentions by source, language and other metrics. You can also generate reports and export them to help with your competitor analysis.
Facebook Audience Insight
What for? Auditing, Competitor & Industry Analysis, Content Development
Here at Zazzle Media we recognise how important this handy tool is and use it in every single social strategy we create. In terms of weaponry – this is our H-bomb. Available in the ‘Tools’ section of your Ads Manager, Audience Insight unlocks a huge amount of audience, demographic and behavioural data.
To see information such as demographics, page likes, location, activity, household and purchase from within your audience type your page name into the ‘Connected to’ tab and watch it generate you a report. These statistics can be invaluable when you are auditing your current social media efforts.
Not only can you see and digest data about your own audience you can also see information regarding a specific competitor or industry. This can be brilliant in understanding and creating wider audience pools or for spotting gaps in the market. This is done slightly differently through the ‘Interests’ section.
Audience Insight can also be used to assist in content development. By looking at the information provided around what pages specific audiences like or their employment status, you can feed this into your content creation piece so you know that the content you’re creating will be relevant within your target audience.
For a complete guide to familiarising yourself with Facebook Audience Insight check out our own Naomi Parry’s beginner’s guide to Facebook Audience insight on HubSpot here.
Studio
What for? Content Development
At Zazzle Media we’re blessed with a fantastic design and development team that pretty much means, when it comes to content, if we can dream it we can do it. But we aware that not everybody reading this will have such easy access to world class design and development.
With this in mind we decided to include a tool solely for its content development capabilities. Studio is a design app that helps you create fun and powerful images easily. Designed to work hand in hand with Instagram we’ve found that you can use it to just as good effect with other networks.
Studio lets you easily add text, layers, filters and offers other design based opportunities that could prove quite costly if you were to use an external design team. Furthermore, Studio lets you view other people’s creations so you can take inspiration or ‘remix’ their designs into your own.
If you still need convincing Mashable’s take on Studio was this: “What Instagram did for photography, this app will do for design”.
Cyfe
What for? Competitor & Industry Analysis, Evaluation
It shouldn’t be underestimated how important it is to align your social media strategy to other aspects of your business. None more so than direct sales and leads, especially to see if social has had an affect on these figures. So it is beneficial for you to have these figures all in one place – which is exactly what Cyfe does.
Cyfe is a very powerful tool that offers a varied number of features from a number of different marketing tools including Google Analytics and all major social media channels. Their social dashboard lets you connect your brand’s pages and pull in all encompassing or individual reports as well as other accounts – such as your competitors.
By having all this information, such as social engagement performance, sales and leads, you can clearly see where you are having the most success meaning it is easier for you to make informed decisions when it comes to evaluating the success of your strategy.
RiteTag
What for? Auditing, Competitor & Industry Analysis
This is our new favourite tool at Zazzle. We have found it so useful for our social strategies and also to help our clients understand the social space that they’re entering and how their customers communicate on social.
When developing a social strategy you need to know what your customers are talking about and more importantly how and why they are going to engage with you. More often than not this is achieved by well-chosen hashtags but which hashtags should you be using? RiteTag identifies trends that have had proven records of achieving results within your space.
For example, if we were to start researching popular trends around ‘fitness’ it then gives you a lot of top-level stats regarding the trend – as well as other sub-trends that relate to give you multiple different avenues of allowing you to not only find your customers but more importantly, for them to find you.
Conclusion:
Social media is one of the most effective marketing tools used by businesses to promote their products, services and ideas. They are also excellent as customer service tools, they help businesses to engage clients and communicate with them in a fast way, from anywhere in the world. Social marketing is based on customer participation, and customer satisfaction is key in this strategy. The social media spheres tend to be hyper competitive, so any tool that may help you gain an edge needs to be checked out.