As we advance into the future, the Internet gets more sophisticated. Conducting business online on social media gets easier and complicated at the same time. Reaching a vast audience and trying to deliver your brand’s message correctly is the ultimate goal. There are tools aplenty to help you plan, execute and achieve this goal. Social media management tools help enhance your brand’s capability to engage with the audience and boost your profits. Here are some of our top picks of social media management tools.
What to look for in a Social Media Management Tool?
Consumers are evolving. Your customers today wouldn’t buy the first option available to them. They have done their research, read reviews, asked friends, and are well aware of their specific needs. So it gets crucial that a brand connects with its audience at a human level to break through the noise.
Fortunately, there’s a way for brands to know what customers have in mind and use the insights to connect with them. Listening to social data can help them gauge all the details needed for good customer service.
Here are some social analytics insights that can empower your brand:
Online Reputation Management
As the market gets saturated, there is hardly any scope for your brand to make mistakes. Avoiding brand reputation crisis moments becomes an absolute must. It may just be one bad review and once it starts catching views and likes on social media, there’s no going back. So it is essential to handle any crisis well in time. Social monitoring tools alert you to potential problems. While seeking a tool, this feature becomes important.
Check on Competitors
Competitive benchmarking is vital for your growth. Tools that help you keep an eye on the competition and provide you competitive intelligence are going to be worth investing in. You will need to learn from others’ faults and take inspiration from the top players. This requires you to keep monitoring what they’re doing.
Tracking Influencers, Engaging with Leads
Managing your business over social media takes a lot of effort. You may be promoting your product/service on the official page, but is someone vouching for it? If your brand is launching a fitness band and is promoting it on the official page chances are that very few people know about it. If Marques Brownlee or Linus Sebastian are talking about it, your product is definitely getting more attention. But how will you know about these influencers? How will you get them to collaborate and promote your business? Social media management tools help you with that.
Also, social media management tools are meant to make this task easier for you. Posting content, researching your audience, competitive analysis, tracking brand mentions all at the same time can make everything seem too much. Hence, look for a tool that can be your one-stop solution. There are tools available that allow you to research for your content, schedule posts, follow your competitors, set up keywords for insights and track influencers all at the same place and the same time without you having to do much.
The Top Social Media Management Tools
There are a lot of tools available offering a varying range of services and these are available at different price points. There are many options to choose from, ensure you pick the one that meets your brand’s needs.
1 Auris
A media management solution that brings together all your brand mentions across social media, news, et cetera in one place. Why keep shuffling between apps when you have one platform for multiple solutions? Auris helps brands with actionable insights via social listening, competitor analysis, social media monitoring, influencer outreach and more.
A platform that helps you track brand mentions in real-time, alerts you to potential crisis moments, guards your brand’s health, provides graphic reports and helps you zero in on your operational fault lines is a must-have. If you need a comprehensive solution take Auris for a test drive before you finalize your list for 2020.
2. Audiense
Understanding your audience and their interests and then speaking to them personally is a difficult task. Audience Segmentation helps you be prepared according to the specific interest field of that segment. Sending across a message to someone you know is always easier than trying to communicate with a complete stranger. Messaging your audience based on their interests is a crucial part of social media marketing.
Audiense helps you identify these interests and break them down so you can categorize and send out personalized messages.
3. CrowdBooster
Creators and innovators need funding, crowdfunding is a must for them especially for high profile projects. And there’s a solution for this – getting social influencers to champion the cause. CrowdBooster helps you grow your community on Instagram and/or Pinterest. It helps you raise funding for your innovation or campaign. It also takes care of press releases and shipping after the campaign is funded and done with.
4. Oktopost
The tool is geared to help with specific social media management needs but crucial for business, especially B2B brands. Oktopost helps you measure the impact from every post or campaign your brand puts forth. It also provides employee advocacy insights, engagement metrics et cetera and more importantly integrates easily with a lot of other tools. It helps you attain invaluable insights and can be integrated with other tools making your life easier.
5. Sendible
Sendible helps you streamline and manage multiple brands at the same time. It provides unique inboxes for each brand making the workflow easier and also offers collaborative tools. Plan your client’s content, schedule it, present individualized reports, and collaborate with Sendible.
6. Storyheap
If your brand counts Snapchat and Instagram as the go-to places for marketing and promotions, you must be familiar with stories. Snapchat and Instagram stories have become quite popular. Storytelling is unique and important, so it’s essential you do it right. Storyheap tells you about your stories, tracks your follower growth, no. of opens, no. of swipe up or clicks, no. of screenshots and so on. The data is very specific so you can dive really deep into the analysis.
We understand that picking one tool for your business can be daunting. Especially for smaller businesses, this decision has to come after some budgeting and adjustments. Thus you want the tool to be tailormade to your needs. We would like to point out that social media marketing tools are worth investing in. And there is no need to sweat it out. Most platforms provide a free trial period. Try one or more of these tools for testing out, before you make a full investment.