4 Best Social Media Management Tools
Smart online entrepreneurs know how important social media is in their online marketing efforts. As an online merchant or affiliate manager, social media is truly a force to be reckoned with, as it provides you a direct communication line between your online company and your consumers.
Social media allows any consumer, who has an internet connection, to get instant access to the newest updates and buzz around your services and products. Furthermore, it helps you build your brand presence as well as generate revenue.
However, as social media continues to grow, managing your social networks becomes a lot tougher. Whether you are monitoring 20 Twitter accounts for your company or juggling your Linkedln and Facebook profiles, social media management will surely take a great deal of time and effort on your end.
Fortunately, there are social media management tools that help you maintain your growing networks and flourishing social sphere. Some of these tools will consolidate your online presence across a variety of networks, while others specialize in maintaining your multiple social media accounts under one site.
No matter what kind of online business you are operating, there is a tool that can make your social media marketing efforts a lot simpler and better.
- Hootsuite
Hootsuite is, without a doubt, one of the most popular and prevalent social media management systems today. As an online marketing tool, Hootsuite has a spectacular array of features that can greatly benefit your business in many ways. Not only will it manage your social media channels, but it can also enable you to know what consumers are saying about your company and brand.
Pros
- With HootSuite, you get to easily manage a multitude of social networks like Foursquare, Google+, Linkedln, Facebook, Twitter, and others
- This social management tool allows you and your personnel to make quick replies to followers and fans, which eliminates the stress of overlooking your valued fans and coordinating replies
- It allows you to manage your customer service on Twitter
- Works on all browsers and has a collection of mobile apps to help you manage your accounts, when you are on the move
- Free reports on your email
- TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a Twitter management system that gives you the power to see everything in your Twitter accounts under a single interface. As an internet marketer, this tool also gives you the freedom to personalize your display by hiding or showing several columns. Since this tool is specifically designed for Twitter, it may not be your best bet if you are looking for a tool to simultaneously manage all your social media accounts. Still, it is a superior tool that allows you to optimize your Twitter marketing efforts.
Pros
- Free and easy to use
- Easily manages all your Twitter profiles
- While TweetDeck is mainly tailored for Twitter, it still can be used to update your other social media sites, such as LinkedIn, Google + and others
- Organized Twitter feeds
- Twitonomy
Twitonomy is a tool that can be used for analytics in your Twitter accounts. With Twitonomy, you get all sorts of stats about your Twitter activities, including Tweet posts a day, links you have shared, hashtags you have often used, and a whole lot more.
Pros
- Get visual and detailed analytics on your network’s hashtags, mentions, replies, retweets, tweets and more
- Get insights as well as filter, search and browse for users you follow and the ones who follow your accounts
- Track the clicks on the URLs posted in your Tweets
- Export or backup reports, mentions, retweets, tweets in one click
- TwitNerd
TwitNerd is an amazing tool that allows you to find the right people to follow. In addition, this tool allows you to create posts that generate a lot of buzz in Twitter sphere. Best of all, it gives you a chance to reply to all your followers in a fast and efficient way. Indeed, this TwitNerd can give your Twitter marketing efforts a boost.
Pros
- Free
- With its ‘Follow by Keyword’ feature, you get to input any phrase or keyword that will introduce you to a variety of popular users and influencers on Twitter
- It automatically creates ‘Follow Friday’ tweets based on a number of factors, such as those who mention you the most and those who retweet your posts
How To Use Pinterest To Build And Develop Your Brand
Remember the old days? When you would had to print thousand flyers and hand them on people’s door in order to advertise what your business has to offer?
Now that everything has gone digital. No longer do you have to walk around the mall parking lot pinning flyers onto people’s windshields. Today you can just pin it on Pinterest for the entire world to see.
The social networking site Pinterest is one of the newest additions to the ever-expanding pool of social media platforms. With Pinterest you can “pin” images of just about anything you want. It can be a picture of a meal you just created or a picture of your favorite sports team.
The Power Of Pinterest
- Pinterest has 459 Million Users and more than 240 billion pins daily
- There are more than 500,000 registered business accounts
- Pinterest offers a 20% referral rate to ecommerce websites
Pinterest For Business
Pinterest isn’t just for individuals, it’s also for businesses. In fact, it provides companies with a very innovative way to not only make their online presence stronger, but also, to build their brand, drive potentially massive amounts of traffic and consequently increase earnings.
Usage Tips
Make sure that you design a branded business profile on Pinterest to further develop brand awareness. They allow you to upload a profile picture, which can be a logo.
Create boards relevant to your niche to create an organized layout to showcase your images.
The key to really benefiting from this site is to post images that inspire and motivate. For instance, if you run a personal training business one of the best things you can do is post images of your client’s results. This will inspire people to want to get out and lose weight too. It will also make them look at you as an expert and therefore build your brand.
Sticking with the personal training model, you can also set up categories such as delicious snack time meals, 5-minute breakfast and so much more.
Whenever you post an image be sure to include keywords in the description, as this is how people will find your content. Have fun with your descriptions. Make them fun for people to read. When you have a great image with a fun description people will want to share it.
To really get all of the benefits associated with Pinterest you will need to learn how to keep things simple. That’s really what it’s all about. It is also a good idea to have a presence on other social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
This will allow you to promote your Pinterest page on those other sites as well. The more exposure your images get the bigger your brand will become.
Another simple thing you can do to bring more attention to your Pinterest profile is to follow the most popular figures on the site. If you follow a big hitter and you re-pin some of their images there is a chance they may follow you back and re-pin some of your material too. If this happens, you can really increase your online presence fairly quickly.
Pinterest is all about exposure. The more exposure you get the bigger your brand will become. So be creative. Use collaboration boards to allow others to post content and ideas as well. This will foster a community that can have a huge impact on your overall brand. It can also keep people coming back, which is a vital part of online success for any business.
Focus On People
Keep in mind that like other social platforms, such as, Twitter and Facebook, a presence on Pinterest involves connecting with real people. Sometimes marketers focus too much on their own needs and don’t pay attention to the platform’s members who are the bread and butter of social media campaigns.
It is called social media for a reason, it is a setting where conversations get started and flourish.
So instead of spamming, connect!
Connect with real people and make yourself a valuable asset, and you will engage more traffic than you can handle.
10 Myths About Social Media Marketing For Online Business
If you are new to social media, it can seem quite daunting and a constant battle to win over followers, however few business online find real success without implementing some type of social media marketing to reach potential customers and leads.
With social media present in every part of life, a lot of myths and rumors are floating around. How do you know what is true and what isn’t? Here are the top 10 myths that you may come across.
- Everyone Is On Social Media
Despite the appearance that every person in the world is on social media, in fact many people are not. Current statistics show that out of the 3 billion active Internet users worldwide, 2.1 billion people have social media accounts, but do not assume that everyone is able to see and comment on your posts. Some only use social media to share pictures of their grandkids with family, and others are only interested in interacting with friends.
- Social Media Will Take Hours And Hours Of Your Time
Some companies give the appearance that they spend all day on social media perfecting their posts and sharing other people’s content. However, this may be the case for some, but it won’t be for all. Most social media sites have automated features that enable you to decide what you want automated, such as following those who start to follow you. This can increase your social media presence without taking up any time on your part.
Most social media marketing experts strongly advise a strict schedule with marketing implementation and a lot of campaign planning in order to prevent spending hours and hours on social media. Organization is key!
- You Only Need Social Media
Social media is an addition to your current marketing strategy, not a replacement. You still need a website to promote your business, email marketing still offers the highest ROI (return on investments), and content marketing such as a blog are all crucial aspects of a multi-faceted marketing campaign. Remember not everyone is on social media so some people will rely solely on your website and it’s never a good idea to put all your marketing eggs in one basket.
- Social Media Leads To Instant Sales
It doesn’t for the simple reason that an online presence on social media takes time to build up. Social media is a road and not a destination. IT takes time to build up a following, and it never really ends, as getting more followers and more shares is an ongoing and long-term effort. Social media marketing success will never happen overnight.
- Social Media Is Only For Young People
People of all ages are now on social media sites and capable of making purchases solely through them. When designing your social media strategy remember whom you are trying to sell to. Assessing and understanding your target audience is critical to not only choosing your social platforms, but also in designing an effective marketing plan.
- The More Posts The Better
Social media is all about quality and not quantity. It is better to have several well thought through posts about key topics than hundreds of mindless updates put out there for the sake of numbers. The Internet audience has short attention spans, and when they are drowning in hundreds of updates, the key messages will get lost.
- You Need Technical Skills To Work Social Media
The most commonly used social media sites are fairly easy to use, even for those new to the world of social media. Start by following some basic tutorials, and the skills will come in time.
- You Must Be On Every Social Media Site To See Success
This simply isn’t true, and may be a huge waste of your time. It is better to do your research and pinpoint which ones will be most influential for your business model. Spend your time on this and only when you are ready should you move onto another one. It is better to have one really good site than several poorly managed ones.
- Social Media Is Too Expensive For A Small Online Business
Social media can be as cheap or expensive as you wish to make it. You can set up profiles for free. Time and education are your main investments.
- The More Followers The Better
This is also much more about quality over quantity; there is no point in having 10,000 followers if not one of them completes your required call to action. It is better to have 100 followers on social media that are highly targeted, loyal, dedicated, and likely to do what you want them to as far as your business is concerned that to have 10,000 who never convert.
