29 Apr 6 Social Media Tools Your Business Needs to Succeed
Social media tools are a necessity for every company large and small in 2015. Simply having a social media presence and trying to update and measure through the standard functionality provided on each social media site will not cut it anymore. Large enterprises have understood this from the beginning, but now small businesses are realizing that part of the success of their social media program is in selecting and properly utilizing the right social media tool. Fortunately, over the last few years there have been a plethora of tools developed to assist business owners and marketers in managing their social media networks. It cannot be understated how important social media tools are for efficient social media marketing management, measurement, and ultimately ROI.
While there are many robust tools which aim to be your singular social media dashboard, there are also others that specialize in certain niches or functionality and do them well. Here’s a selection of a varity of social media tools that will enable every business who chooses to utilize them to maximize their social ROI.
1. B2B Social Media Dashboard: Oktopost
A social media dashboard is built to track the efforts of social media marketing in general and social media campaigns specifically in order to optimize the business generated directly from social media campaigns and overall social efforts. Being able to keep track of what is producing the results and what is not is the only way to be sure that money and time are not being wasted. The more optimized the social media marketing is, the more targeted the traffic will be. Which leads to what matters most – metrics.
The metrics that matter the most for B2B companies are the referred traffic and conversions of the traffic from the social outlets. Finding out what works best for marketing on the social networks and then implementing automation is why Oktopost is the best B2B social media dashboard.
Socialmedia.biz made the comparison of in B2C what HootSuite is, Oktopost is to B2B. Oktopost helps in the management of the entire network that has been built. Oktopost allows for more time to be freed up. It is advanced enough to suggest posts based upon specific business niche.
There are also other advanced automation tools in the Oktopost social media dashboard such as editorial calendering. Furthermore Oktopost seamlessly integrates with the other B2B marketing tools you are probably already using such as Salesforce, Marketo, Act-on and Eloqua to give you granular detail to your social media measurement.
2. Listening: Synthesio
Social listening provides a guide for a brand to better understand what is said about their company, their products, their competitors, and general public sentiment. Companies use listening platforms not only for customer service and opportunities for business development engagement, but even to do R&D to discover the current trends to create products to better serve public needs.
Synthesio has long been a leader in enterprise listening platforms and was named as such in the Forrester Wave Enterprise Listening Platforms Report. When investing in a listening platform, functionality such as advanced data processing capabilities such as automated analysis, user-friendly dashboards, flexible reporting features, and strong integration and partnerships are the checklist items which Synthesio outperforms their competitors on. In addition, being based in Europe has helped Synthesio develop a platform which has un-paralleled global data coverage, essential to global social media management for global enterprises.
3. Social CRM: Agora Pulse
Agora Pulse provides a host of Facebok applications to attract and engage with your fans on Facebook. This tool goes above and beyond that by providing CRM data about your Facebook fans so that you can focus on finding out who your biggest fans are and how to best engage with them. Agora Pulse allows you to do the same with your Twitter following, so you can use this tool as a quasi-Social CRM for your Facebook and Twitter communities. Similar functionality supporting Instagram has been recently added as well.
In addition, the analytics of Agora Pulse allow a brand to analyze and interpret large amounts of data such as, demographics of customers, history of purchases, and online experiences. This data assists a company in realizing both who their unique influences as well as painting the big picture as to how they are performing on a social media user basis.
4. Adovcacy: GaggleAMP
GaggleAMP is a powerful tool that can be used to facilitate an advocacy program. One cannot effectively scale an advocacy program simply by asking employees, partners, and fans to cut-and-paste a tweet into their social media dashboard of choice from an email. Have your advocates use GaggleAMP so that they can easily choose what content to post on what network at what time. You gain the benefit of receiving robust analytics to measure and optimize your program to give your advocates more of the content they want to share.
GaggleAMP also includes other features for more advanced advocacy programs such as support for point-counting gamification, robust reporting, and integrations for many of the tools you already use such as Cision, Hubspot, Hootsuite, Marketo, and Oracle.
5. Social Media Analytics: Simply Measured
Simply Measured hands-down provides the most robust stand-alone analytics platform out there. Having access to robust metrics is the only way to properly measure and optimize your social media program to ensure maximum ROI, and Simply Measured provides deep analysis of your social media presence as well as your competitors over all of the major social networks.
From profile analytics and audience insights to content and campaign performance, brand and hashtag monitoring, cross-channel analysis, competitive analysis and benchmarking, and social advertising analytics, Simply Measured is the standard in the industry against which others are measured when it comes to social media analytics platforms.
If you are serious about your social media marketing, you need to take a closer look at Simply Measured.
6. Growing Local Online Presence as a Small Business: Likeable Local
Not every business is a large enterprise, so not every social media tool will be appropriate for every business. This is especially true if you are a small business.
Small businesses should be trying to get the most out of local online presence and Likeable Local is the best tool in the industry to help them do so. (Obviously, I’m biased, but, boy, am I a believer!) It will help you connect with, as well as maintain leads that are targeted to a specific business or topic. Likeable Local is up to 60 times more efficient than other alternatives. This information was gathered through a competitive analysis of the industry.
Likeable Local is 4 times more efficient than reputation.com based on the percent of fans reached. Likeable Local can manage content creation and curation for you across multiple platforms. This takes the hassle and stress out of coming up with content that engages customers.
Likeable Local is known for being an enthusiastic company that puts their clients first. They take it a step further by helping set up an efficient advertising platform to bring laser targeted leads to your business and encourage referral leads as well. This helps scale a business into multiple tiers and increases ROI.
These six tools are the best in the industry for what they specialize in. They are not only proven, but cost effective for what they provide. If you are looking to stand out among competitors, go with the tools that are proven to work.
All of these social media tools companies – and more – will be at the Social Tools Summit in San Francisco on October 27-28 to give you advice as to how best to leverage their tools for your company. Won’t you join us? Go to http://socialtoolssummit.com for more information.
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