Posted by There are so many benefits of using social media for marketing, market research, customer engagement, customer retention, outreach, public relations, etc.
The biggest benefit perhaps is how effective, both in terms of cost and performance, social media is for marketing activities.
So, how do you go about conducting various business activities on social media?
You could do everything manually of course. But wouldn’t that be counterproductive? I mean imagine having to post regularly at a specific time on different platforms. Then you will have to engage with your audience as well.
There’s data gathering and analysis as well. Let’s also not forget that you have to craft content for the posts too (i.e. blogs, videos, infographics, polls, charts). You can use drag and drop tools with pre-made templates for your visual content.
That seems a lot! Doesn’t it? If you’re doing all of this all through the day, when will you actually run your business?
Well, there is a simpler way to accomplish all of this. All you need is powerful social media tools.
4 Essential Types of Social Media Tools for Businesses
Social media tools can make marketing hassle-free for you. You will save not just on time but resources as well. Moreover, the marketing efforts become more productive with social media tools.
Let’s consider the top 4 types of social media tools along with examples!
1. Social Media Scheduling Tools
There are a lot of things you have to manage when running a business. Amidst all the ensuing chaos, it is difficult to post regularly on social media.
Posting isn’t even a simple game. You have to post on specific times and days to maximize your reach and engagement. Managing all of this while running a business isn’t feasible for most people.
This is where scheduling tools step in.
These are the things possible with a social media scheduling tool:
- Publish the same post on different social media platforms at the same time.
- Schedule multiple posts across different social media platforms.
- Organize and monitor all the published posts from a central location.
- Plan, create, and schedule posts in a queue to be published.
There are many tools available in the market that have the features mentioned above. Most of the scheduling tools also double up as content management tools. Thus, you will be able to create, curate, and organize all your social media content.
Here are two suggestions from our end.
1. Crowdfire
Crowdfire is a social media management tool that allows you to manage multiple social media accounts at the same time. They offer all the standard features and more.
If you’re a small business, Crowdfire has a free plan made just for your needs. Their paid plans are catered to meet all the social media management needs of medium to big businesses and ad agencies.
2. Buffer
Buffer is another reliable social media management tool that enables you to plan and schedule social media posts effectively.
Similar to Crowdfire, they have a free plan that is well suited for the needs of small businesses. They have many advanced features that will suffice the needs of agencies and medium and large enterprises.
2. Social Media Engagement Tools
The only reason social media marketing is so effective is that it allows a business to directly engage with its audience.
Having a direct line of communication with existing and potential customers has multiple benefits. People value businesses that listen, solve customer queries and problems and stay in touch.
Engaging with your audience manually is not a simple task. If you have an active presence across various social media platforms, the difficulty to handle interactions only skyrockets.
Social media engagement tools are designed to facilitate cross-platform communication with your audience.
Here is how they make engagement easy and manageable:
- Centralize all communications from different platforms in one place.
- Enables businesses to respond to comments and mentions from one place.
- Assign different communications to people most apt for handling them.
- Provide the communication history of an individual reaching out to you from different platforms.
Sounds like some kind of sorcery, doesn’t it? You can thank technology and the people who make such marvelous things possible.
Continuing, we would like to suggest two social media engagement tools for you.
1. Statusbrew
Statusbrew is a powerful social media engagement tool that supports multiple platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
It has a plethora of features that enable you to make every customer feel like they’re listened to and valued by your business. It had one central inbox for all your messages and comments from different social media platforms.
Moreover, they offer automation that enables businesses to automatically respond to certain queries or quickly reply to certain comments and messages.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another well-known social media engagement tool. It delivers strongly when it comes to providing prompt and personalized customer service to your audience through different social media channels.
Hootsuite has a social inbox that displays all communications like messages and comments from different platforms in one place.
You can assign permission to different team members so each one is tasked to deal with issues they are most capable of solving.
3. Social Media Analytics Tools
When it comes to doing business in the 21st century, data is everything. This fact is especially true if you operate your business online and utilize social media for marketing operations.
Data reveals a lot of insights that aid effective decision-making. Social media is a treasure trove of data that you can use to generate actionable insights.
Armed with these insights you can take effective decisions and rapidly grow your sales and in terms of the business’s revenue.
This is where a social media analytics tool comes into play. It allows businesses to gather data, create a database, and process it to generate valuable insights.
Here are all the things possible with a social media analytics tool:
- Tracking how you’re performing on different social media channels from one place.
- Monitor how well you’re engaging with your audience.
- Scout social media platforms and find out what your competitors are up to.
- Track and monitor individual social media marketing campaigns.
Insights are a powerful asset. They can help you make the necessary adjustments to your social media strategy to make it yield the expected results.
Well, you know the drill right? Here are three social media analytics tools that we would like you to check out!
1. Social Status
Social Status is a social media analytics tool that specializes purely in social media analytics and reporting. Apart from supporting all the main social media channels, the tool includes access to benchmarks, ads analytics, competitive analysis, and influencer campaign tracking.
Reports can be customized to suit your reporting needs and exported to CSV, PDF, PowerPoint, and Google Slides.
2. Sprout Social
A powerful analytics tool in all right, Sprout Social generates actionable insights. One can easily monitor the marketing performance on a social media platform. One can also compare the performance of a post across different social media platforms.
Generating and sharing presentation-ready reports is Sprout Social’s forte. You can step up things further by creating custom reports that focus on specific KPIs.
3. HubSpot
If you’re into digital marketing, chances are you already know about HubSpot. HubSpot is an industry titan when it comes to social media analytics.
Their social media analytics tool is just one of their offerings. They offer every solution that a social media marketer might need.
With HubSpot, you can establish relations between social media performance, revenue growth, and business objectives easily. All insights are represented graphically and it is easy to share reports and collaborate on marketing campaigns. To use HubSpot to its full potential, you can also look into HubSpot CRM integrations to get the most out of the software.
4. Social Media Listening Tools
Listening to what is being said about your brand and the industry you operate in can benefit any business tremendously. You understand what the market expects from your brand and the industry in general.
Moreover, you can assess the reaction of your existing customer base and audience concerning your products, services, and marketing campaigns.
Having clarity about what works in the market and what doesn’t is helpful. Knowing what the audiences expect from you helps you deliver well on those expectations.
Following this approach, aided by social media listening tools, you can improve customer satisfaction and customer retention, and improve marketing, products, and services.
Let’s check what more does a social media listening tool enables you to do:
- Know and understand the general sentiment of social media users towards a brand, marketing campaigns, and the industry as a whole.
- Analyze marketing campaigns and understand which elements of it worked well and which did not.
- Anticipate shifts and trends in the industry by identifying key indicators of change.
- Pinpoint opportunities by identifying gaps in offerings in the industry. Helps capitalize on the expectations not fulfilled by competition.
A social media listening tool is what you need to identify new opportunities in the market, gain a competitive edge and improve your business and offerings.
And now we have two social media listening tools we would like you to check out!
1. Falcon.io
Falcon.io is a social media customer experience management platform for businesses of all sizes. It has a central dashboard where you can monitor social listening from all the social media platforms you’re present on.
Falcon.io alerts you when there are spikes in a certain sentiment towards your brand. This will keep you on your toes. You can deal with unpleasant situations quickly and replicate positive situations in the future.
2. Mention
Mention is another capable social media listening tool that is far more versatile than others. It enables you to track content and mentions in 42 different languages across different social media platforms.
This makes Mention the top choice for businesses that are truly global in terms of the scale of business operations. They even have a competitive analysis that lets you listen and compare your performance with two or more competitors.
To Sum It Up
A business’s social media presence is vital to its growth and longevity. In a world becoming ever more digital, it has become important to use social media effectively.
A lot of business operations can be carried out on social media which is effective. However, to save on resources and time, you will need different social media tools to assist different operations.
With these tools, you will be able to grow consistently and consolidate that growth!