Find More Time with These 10 ‘Must-Have’ Tools
Guest Author: Aditi Parkash
Note to Self: Organize my social media management.
But how? This article delivers the best tools for you to organize and incorporate efficiencies in your social media marketing in 2016. Whew – what a relief!
Effective, efficient social media management is crucial to having a solid social media marketing strategy. If you are a social media manager, you probably already know the importance of having management tools, and this trend is growing increasingly.
The tools you use can help you achieve a number of tasks like content discovery, content scheduling, and social media monitoring. You can gain more followers, increase engagement and of course grow your business by using the right social media management tools.
There is a large variety of tools that can help you manage your social media accounts. Let’s dive in to see what some of these tools can help you accomplish.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a powerful social media monitoring tool and has advanced big data crawling capabilities. In fact, Talkwalker’s search index covers over 150 million sources in several different languages. If you are using Talkwalker, you simply need to specify your brand, any related topics that you would like to track and your competitors. Talkwalker gives you upto 100 influencers for any project that you might be working on and also for various media types.
Even though Talkwalker is quite an advanced tool in what it offers, it is quite easy to use and is very user-friendly. You will not have to go through any type of training to understand how the tool works.
The process of analysis is quick and the tool’s search engine allows rapid searches which sift through millions of data sources. You can control the findings and receive multiple combinations of results that are based on your findings. Also, the tool lets you create custom templates for daily, weekly, or monthly reports.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a great tool for beginners who are trying to manage their Twitter account. Twitter can be overwhelming sometimes with posts moving by really quickly. You can never be sure if you have tapped into every opportunity possible on Twitter. With TweetDeck, you can search for various keywords and easily spot conversations where you or your brand is being talked about.
TweetDeck even lets you monitor hashtags and also lets you add multiple accounts if that is something you require.
DrumUp
DrumUp is a stylish social media management tool that can completely take over your social media activities for you. The tool can help you curate content that aligns with your business. You can input specific keywords in the settings page of the tool. For example, if your business deals with real estate you can specify keywords like residential/commercial real estate, home ownership, property investment etc.
The tool will provide relevant story recommendations and if you would like to narrow down your search even further, you can add negative keywords as well. DrumUp gives you the freshest content recommendation on the web and is a great alternative to other curation tools.
Most of all, it lets you schedule and share your newly discovered content on various social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It even lets you create custom posts that you can schedule at a desired time.
Mention
As important as it is to create and curate content for your social media pages, it is also important to understand the impact your content is making on social media. With Mention, you can get an overview of your brand and track the overall performance of your social media marketing strategy. All you need to do is put in brand-related keywords into the tool, and you can find out the number of times your brand has been mentioned.
Mention also sends across real-time alerts whenever there is a mention of your brand and you can find out if the mentions are positive, neutral or negative. This way you can keep an eye on your brand’s online reputation and fix any potential damages if necessary.
Similar to Instapaper, Pocket is also a bookmarking tool that allows you to save links to blog posts, articles, videos and more. The tool currently has over 17 million users and has been picked up really well by audiences.
Once a link is saved on Pocket, it automatically gets saved on your phone, computer or your tablet, which means you can access your links across all platforms. More importantly, the saved links can be accessed even when you are offline. If you like an article on Twitter or any other similar application, Pocket lets you save links directly from these applications so you don’t have to look it up on your browser and then save.
Feedly
Content hunting days are finally over! The Feedly Reader is an amazing tool if you need to find content in a short period of time. With the News Reader by Feedly, you can add feeds from various blogs and websites and the content will stream right through to your reader. You can set up several categories like food, travel, marketing, social media, photography and more. Once the content starts streaming in, Feedly organizes it neatly into categories.
Using Feedly, you can share the content on Facebook, Twitter or your LinkedIn pages. However, it does not give you the option to schedule the content. If you have particular topics of interest, these are marked with hashtags so that they can be easily discovered later on. Also, the content on Feedly comes from high-authority sources so you can be rest assured that it is good quality content.
Social Mention
Social Mention, a real-time search platform, tracks over a hundred social media websites to help you monitor your brand and how it is being talked about. It is a great listening tool as it provides in-depth analysis of data and measures influence using four different categories. These categories are passion, strength, reach and sentiment. Getting started is simple, and all you have to do is enter your website’s or your product name and it can gather results for you. These results can be used to judge your brand’s impact.
Instapaper
A bookmarking tool can always make life easy. However, Instapaper can offer much more than just a bookmarking service. If you are one of those people who stumble upon some great articles but don’t get time to read them at the same time, Instapaper is a tool you should definitely add to your toolbox. This tool can save links for you so that you can come back to them, when there is more time on your hands.
If while reading you come across parts that are interesting, you can highlight and add comments to the particular paragraph so you can remember it the next time.
Followerwonk
If Twitter analytics is something you are interested in, Followerwonk is a must have. It is the best tool to help you optimize your visibility online and boost your social media growth. The tool allows you to compare and contrast your social graph to other competing brands to see how your brand is doing and what you can do to improve your marketing strategies.
Followerwonk also makes influencer marketing really simple by letting you search Twitter bios and categorize them by location, number of followers, overall influence and more. It also provides rankings for influencers which can help you make marketing related decisions as well.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is probably the easiest tool you can work with if you are just starting out with analytics. The set up is super easy and once it’s done, you can start monitoring websites for engaging content and also look for brand mentions. You will have to enter specific keywords related to what you want to monitor, and Google Alerts will send you real-time alerts once it finds a match. The best part is that you can receive these alerts in your email and you can set it up so that every time there is a new source mentioning your brand, Google Alert will notify you right away.
If you are a content marketer, you can keep track of trending topics that are popping up so you can create around it. This way, there is a higher chance of the content getting picked up quickly by your audience.
In Summary
There are a lot of tasks that make up social media management. You need to create and curate content for your social media accounts, publish the content at the right time and of course track the impact that your content has on social media. The above-mentioned tools can surely make those tasks a little easier for you while letting you get the most audience engagement as you can!
Author Bio:
Aditi Prakash is a blogger at Godot Media, a leading blog writing services firm. She writes extensively on content marketing and social media marketing. She also has numerous guest posts on various other blogs.