Social Media is undoubtedly the most powerful marketing platform in the world. This phenomenon is set to get even bigger in 2014 with millions of businesses using this platform to market their products and services. Managing social media presence and your various campaigns can be tricky and tiring especially when we are talking about multiple platforms. It takes a lot of quality time and if you don’t have dedicated resource, you can hire manpower to handle campaigns so that you don’t fall flat and get a denial for the edge you were looking for.
The smart way to go about streamlining your campaigns and use social media tools that allow you to manage campaigns over multiple platforms effectively. These tools ensure that all your social media campaigns run smoothly and efficiently across platforms. These tools save time and most importantly allow you to engage with your audience thus allowing you to draw maximum out of your campaign. Here are the 10 most effective Social Media Tools that you must use in 2014.
1. Mention
Developed as an alternative to Google Alerts, it is one of the best tools to monitor the presence of your brand across the web. This awesome tool searches your brand name or keywords and offers you insights into social networks, forums, blogs and more. There is also a social feature that allows you to respond to mentions of your brand and share any news item that you may find adds value to your brand.
2. Addvocate
This tool solves one of the biggest challenges that you have with social media promotion – how to decentralize your messages. You can use the network of your employees (which in most cases is larger) to promote your business. They need to install a simple browser plugin that allows them to receive content recommendations from a centralized marketing team that they can share on their network. The marketing team also receives statistics on who shared the content and how many clicks and engagement it creates.
3. Buffer
It is a powerful social media publishing tool that sends your updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and App.net in real-time. This amazing tool also has built-in analytics that allows you to understand the response from the updates and where they are fetching eyeballs from. This insight helps in planning out the timing of other posts perfectly. Buffer also allows you to collaborate with your team and keep the social media accounts updated regularly.
4. Twitter Counter
This is one of the simplest and the most used social media tools by marketers around the world. This allows you to track the growth of Twitter and spot for the latest trends among your followers. You will be able to tracks changes in your follower count easily and it also predicts future growth over time.
5. Manage Flitter
It is important to follow the right people on Twitter and get rid of spam accounts. With the help of this tool you will be able to work faster and smarter with your Twitter handle. It allows you to find relevant people to follow and connect with by searching bios, location and keywords. It spots spam accounts and helps you unfollow them easily. You can also schedule your tweets at optimal times when your followers are most likely to see your updates and also receive analytics of the Twitter account.
6. Feedly
Finding quality content to share with your audience is now very easy with the help of this too. You can use this tool to search for new content that is relevant to your business. Apart from this you can also subscribe to RSS feeds and keep track of the latest happenings in your industry.
7. SocialBakers
When you have large fan following it becomes important for you to know about the engagement rates and channel growth. You need to also have in-depth knowledge on contributors who are most active within your network and who are helping you build relationships with new clients and audience. It will also let you find out how your campaign is faring against your competitors and what kind of campaigns are likely to fetch you maximum mileage to your brand.
8. Bottlenose
It is important to keep a tab on your social media to derive maximum out of it and Bottlenose allows you to achieve this easily. This tool went through a recent upgrade and now also features a real time search engine where information from the social network is displayed in an algorithmic order of importance. Thus you will be able to know the latest trends in the social media and sort content that have been best ranked by the users.
9. Post Planner
This is a Facebook specific tool that allows you to schedule content. Apart from this it also allows you to source content and adding to your posting queue. While sourcing content you will be able to search to a large database that lists thousands of status updates or a range of topics. This let you find what’s trending on the social media and make use of it.
10. Zapier
It acts as a bridge for all the services that you are using independently and connects those services to make your life simple. So, if one of your team members is using different chat messengers you can set up notifications for them within Zapier.
About the Author:
Mark Wilston is a Content marketing professional working with PixelCrayons, a reputed Web & Mobile Application development company. He loves to read and write different blogs related to web design, technologies, Social media and other tech news. Contributing in a blog post aids him spreading the words online with a new set of people. Follow on Twitter and Facebook.
