Regardless of company size, social media has tremendous power, to not only promote your brand digitally, it also allows you to converse with potential and existing clients in an informal manner. If you, as a brand, are considering investing time and resources in a social strategy It's imperative that you can quantify as well as qualify the content that is being shared across your channels.
But we as community managers and marketeers are mere humans, we must therefore accept a little assistance from online tools in our engagement endeavours.
Since the dawn of social media tools have popped up, offering a wealth of insight and support, as with most aspects of life, when offered so many options it can be hard to know which way to turn. As such I have shared my top 3 social media tools;
1. Buffer
Let us begin with my favourite. Buffer combines not only all of the positive attributes of many other tools, but an host of other new insightful ones. Without doubt, for me, the best aspect of Buffer is the scheduling mechanism, it's speedy, user friendly, simple and best of all you you can upload to all channels simultaneously.
You can view analytics easily without having to move away from the main dashboard. Within analytics you can see the likes, shares, clicks and cumulative reach of your posts, which provides guidance for future posts.
2. Mention
The internet is a vast and wondrous place, and knowing what is going it all the time is incredibly time consuming, however incredibly important to ensure that your brand is gaining the exposure it needs. Mention allows you to monitor the web and social channels.
Mention allows you to search for and follow important conversations, allowing brands to get involved and share expertise, or start a conversation. The dashboard allows you to see and manage online mentions of the keywords you're tracking, which can also be send as an email alert.
3. Hootsuite
It must be said there is some overlap between the Hootsuite and Buffer in terms of functionality. The most useful aspect of Hootsuite is the ability to view multiple social channel streams all in one place. You can then go on to get detailed analytics which include fairly robust graphs and charts detailing social interaction and success of posts.
Hootsuite is most certainly the most efficient tool for overseeing numerous brands and their channels, the iPhone and android app is also hugely useful and user friendly.
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