Looking for the best social media or media tools to get you started and keep you on top of everything? I’ve used a lot of different social media tools over the years, so I thought I would share my experience with others. However, this is not about what are social media tools used for or what is social media tools. This is about the best ones that I think will make your job easier.
Social media is a great way to connect and interact with other businesses or business owners. But it can be frustrating when you want to learn more about social media tools and best social media tools. This article will introduce to you useful social media networking sites, tips and tricks for your business. All of this so you can quickly determine what are social media tools used for
1. To Keep Up with Social Engagement
Social media’s made it easier than ever for customers to reach out to brands they want to interact with. Whether it’s asking questions, singing praises or voicing constructive criticism, customers now have a direct channel for giving brands their feedback, and they’re taking full advantage.
According to the customer service software company Zendesk, nearly 40% of customers already use social media for customer service. Not only that, but 42% of customers who reach out to brands on social expect a response in under 60 minutes. But while consumer expectations are rising, brands are struggling to keep up – 8 in 9 social media messages that require response go unanswered in the first 72 hours.
However, there are examples of companies who take the initiative to respond to all of their social media messages.
Not only is the sandwich company Jimmy John’s freaky fast with delivery, they’re freaky fast with their social customer engagement. Take a look at some of the examples of times they proved to their customers they were paying attention.
2. To Manage Multiple Social Pages
Some businesses rely on multiple social profiles and networks for their marketing efforts, which can make managing social exponentially more complex. There are many reasons why a company would have multiple social pages (different product lines, teams, locations, etc.), but imagine how much harder it would be to manage them if you had to log in and out of each individual profile and network to check all of your messages.
Social media tools can aggregate the messages sent to all of your profiles and networks into one spot, saving you the time and effort needed to constantly juggle accounts.
3. To Manage Customer Relationships
Every customer is unique and it’s important to treat them as such. Avoid canned responses and use a tool that keeps notes about those you’ve interacted with and tracks your conversation history so that you can personalize every experience.
You can mark relevant notes so that your team knows exactly how to engage with specific fans, or to denote which part of the sales cycle that person is in.
4. To Streamline Team Collaboration
If you’re working with a large account – or several smaller accounts – you may have a team helping you out. However, several people working together on social can get a bit confusing – you may run into issues like having multiple people respond to the same message, or having messages completely slip through the cracks.
You should be able to use a tool that allows you to work within a shared inbox, that will show you when someone is currently interacting with a message, and lets you complete that message to clear it from your inbox.
5. To Increase Social Accountability
We’ve all seen the social media snafus, when hackers or rogue employees publish content that they shouldn’t have. It can be entertaining for an outsider looking in, but what’s humorous for consumers is potentially devastating for brands.
A smart social media management platform can reduce your brand’s risk by providing additional layers and permissions so only trusted employees can actually send messages to your profiles. If something ever slips through the cracks, you’ll have visibility into who sent the inappropriate message, enabling you to deal with each situation accordingly.
Some Tools include;
BuzzSumo
Website: https://buzzsumo.com/
Pricing: Plans start at $79/month
Details:
BuzzSumo is a tool that lets you find the most shared content and trending influencers. You can use it to analyze which content performs best for any topic and all you need to do to get started is to search for a topic or a domain.
Through BuzzSumo you’re able all gather a better understanding of your impact on social media and develop smarter content strategies by seeing which of your own pages were engaged with the most. BuzzSumo will break the results down by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit shares.
This provides the added benefit of being able to see which articles are performing well across the web without having to constantly monitor multiple social channels.
Google Trends
Website: https://trends.google.com/trends/
Pricing: Free
Details:
Google Trends is a completely free tool that Google created to help anyone search for trending topics online.
Brands use it to monitor notable things that are happening in the world. Many professionals use this as a way to discover and share information related to what’s most popular right now.
You can also use Google Trends to monitor keywords to see if they are trending and how their current volume compares to previous months and years. You can then use this information to inform your content and social media marketing strategy.
Buffer
The platform for successful social media management
Prices: Forever free plan, $5, $10, add $10 per month per social channel connected (with a 14-day free trial).
Description: Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by small businesses and individuals to help drive meaningful engagement and results on social media.
We have a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics, simple landing pages, and team collaboration. Our products are carefully considered and highly refined in order to help social media marketers and teams work more efficiently and effectively.
Unique value: What we’ve heard from our customers is that they love how clean and intuitive our tools are, how friendly and timely our customer support is, and how helpful our content is.
HubSpot’s Social Inbox Tool
Price: Starts at $800/month, included in the Marketing Hub Professional tier
HubSpot’s Social Inbox tool saves you valuable time while still optimizing your social efforts. Schedule your posts, integrate your social networks with your blog, and monitor messages and mentions so you can nurture new leads.
HubSpot also integrates all of your marketing with your CRM, so it’s easy to figure out how many leads and customers you’re receiving directly from social media. “HubSpot Marketing Hub … puts the potential of corporate marketing within everyone’s reach,” one customer says.
Hootsuite
Manage all your social media in one place
Prices: Free plan, $29, $129, $599 per month, and enterprise pricing (with a 30-day free trial)
Description: Hootsuite, probably the biggest social media management tool, is used by over 15 million people and more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies.
There’s a good reason for their success: it’s an all-in-one platform that allows you to curate and schedule content, measure your social ROI, run social media ads, and more.
Unique value: Being such a comprehensive platform, there are several things that people love about Hootsuite: being able to monitor multiple accounts and keywords, connect with over 35 social networks, and bulk-schedule social media posts.
Kicksta
Price: Starts at $49/month for individual creatives
Kicksta is an Instagram growth service that helps you get more organic followers on your Instagram business account. Using your company account, the growth service “likes” around 30,000 photos a month on carefully-targeted accounts. Those users — real people, not spam bots or fake accounts — will begin to follow your account, increasing your brand awareness.
Kicksta is a good fit for any industry and provides a friendly, responsive, and helpful customer success team. “Kicksta helps introduce new audiences to our brand while providing consistent organic Instagram growth,” says Ryan Beltran, CEO of watch company Original Grain. “It’s great for social proof too!”
Unfold
Price: Free
Described as “a toolkit for storytellers”, Unfold is an iOS and Android app that helps you create beautiful templates for Instagram stories. Bringing your creative visions to life is the driving idea behind Unfold.
It’s an ideal app for lifestyle brands who want to create stylish collages to keep their social media accounts on-brand and receive the maximum amount of engagement from followers.
Conclusion:
Social media is a powerful marketing tool if used correctly. It can help you connect with your audience, grow you network and even create new opportunities for your business. But when you are staring at your social media it can be hard to know where to start. It’s easy to overwhelm yourself and feel like it is a huge task to keep up with all the social platforms that are out there.