5 Social Media Tool Kit Essentials

Social media as a marketing channel is now virtually a must for businesses of all shapes and sizes. However, one of the unrecognised hurdles of social media is the complexity required to manage your social outlay. That said, as social media has developed so too has a range of tools to accompany the platforms themselves.

Hootsuite

What does it do? Allows you to schedule social media updates throughout the day across a range of platforms and from a number of accounts.

What is its business benefit? Hootsuite enables knowledge sharing via social media to be a structured, automated process, and allows your updates to be planned in a time-efficient manner.

What type of business does it suit? Businesses focused on content marketing and those that are eager to share their thought leadership are well to suited to Hootsuite, given its capabilities of sharing content in a timely, planned and structured way.

Social Mention

What does it do? Measures key terms which are orbiting the social sphere on a variety of metrics, including mentions, sentiment, sources of mentions and associated keywords.

What is its business benefit? “What can be measured can be improved.” Social media is no different. However, social media measurement is still an unproven, contentious space. Resultantly, few businesses are willing to invest heavily in it. Social Mention allows businesses to get a high-level read of how they are perceived socially – for free.

What type of business does it suit? A business with a strong social media presence. There is a certain “social cost of entry” with Social Mention: if your social media presence involves using Twitter once a week, you will not be identified on any metrics; however, for the highly socially engaged business that is looking to converse, measure and improve social media presence, Social Mention will enable you to evaluate your presence.

Tweetreach

What does it do? Tweetreach identifies the reach and exposure a hashtag has, while providing auxiliary information on hashtag users and timing.

What is its business benefit? As Twitter campaigns edge closer to being the norm, the use of hashtags has become prominent. Tweetreach will give an indication as to how many people your campaign may have touched and who it potentially could have influenced.

What type of business does it suit? Any business that is seeking to run a Twitter campaign should engage with Tweetreach to gain not just reach metrics, but to target who has engaged (ie retweeted and mentioned) with their hashtag.

Muck Rack

What does it do? A website-cum-database, which doubles as a database of journalists on Twitter, while giving an up-to-the-minute overview of what journalists are discussing.

What is its business benefit? Journalists are a core influential group and their endorsement on Twitter follows a similar model to traditional PR: discussion by members of this group can allow a business to be presented favourably through conversations with so-called “power tweeters” while having their name exposed to a larger following. Muck Rack enables social media users to target journalists much more easily and gives an insight into their mindset, increasing the possibility of achieving these benefits.

What type of business does it suit? Any business that focuses on PR as its core marketing outlet as opposed to more direct methods and thus wishes to converse with journalists can use Muck Rack to target its initiatives. Suffice to say, this necessity is heightened within the PR and wider communications industry.

Social Bakers

What does it do? The instant social media insight tool offers insight across a number of sectors from airlines to politics to celebrity. Available data ranges from basic information, such as number of followers, to more advanced industry specific reports and CPC (cost-per-click) information by market.

What is its business benefit? With stretched budgets, research and insight funds are often tight. Social Bakers offers competitive social media intelligence at substantial cost saving compared with a social media research agency.

What type of business does it suit? Any business that uses social media as its key marketing outlay should investigate Social Bakers. As the social sphere continues to expand, increasing clutter muddies the social brandscape. Social Bakers helps to cut through this clutter and provides a clearer picture. Therefore, if you pride yourself on being a social business consider visiting “the bakery”.

The above featured on UK newspaper The Guardian’s website here sharing their tips on how to best manage social media using an array of social media tools.

Sectors: Communications and Electronics & IT Technologies
Topics: Advertising and Getting Started
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