The popularity and effectiveness of Social Media platforms has meant that there are now a huge array of tools to help give your Social Media Marketing a helping hand, alongside measuring their success levels. This can only be a good thing, as certain tools crossover with one another, allowing for an in-depth assessment of Social Media in every way imaginable.
So what tools can you use to directly track and enhance your Social Media campaigns?
RiteTag
Ever feel your hashtag may get lost in the ocean of others who are tweeting about the same topic? RiteTag allows you to assess the reach of your Tweets with ease, visualising how effective individual hashtags will be. With a simple colour coding system, you can see the visibility of your hashtags before it is even sent out.
Buffer
When it comes to scheduling, Buffer is one of the newest, but also one of the best. Buffer has a set of tools itself, in order to deduce which posts are getting the most interaction, and what you are doing right.
Keyhole
This tracking tool allows you to see just how effective your hashtag campaign has been; especially handy for individual Social Media campaigns. You could use it for a particular event, and monitor it’s usage and popularity, whether they’re your followers or not. Keyhole also allows influencer marketing, with people talking about your interests, and the ability to track trends or stories.
AgoraPulse
A very powerful tool, AgoraPulse is useful in a variety of ways. It allows you to create Applications on your Facebook page; whether it’s a quiz, a vote, or a sweepstake. You can measure the performance of your Facebook page in real-time, and moderate it with managing tools, alongside exporting data to your CRM or email software to turn Facebook fans directly into clients.
Bitly
Bitly is an easy to use link shortener, which also allows you to see the engagement on your shared links. In doing so, you can see which links are the most valuable. Another plus of using Bitly, is that it’s reported to be the most-clicked form of link across Social Media; so that has to have some form of value in itself.
Rival IQ
It’s all very well keeping your own profiles up-to-date, but it’s equally important to keep in touch with what the competition is up to. This is where Rival IQ comes in, tracking brands of your choosing, surveying their updates across many Social Networks, and even monitoring their SEO. Not only does this allow to see what your rivals are up to, you also stay in-the-know about your industry.
Social Mention
Monitoring over 100 Social Networks, Social Mention allows you an insight into what is said about your business. You can track and measure any topic, whether it’s your company or product as an example, all in real-time. A very handy and underestimated tool.
NeedTagger
This tool is great for generating new leads, and acquiring new customers. Described as “Twitter Search on Steroids”, NeedTagger lets you manage your brand with ease, and target potential customers with specific searches; including location and Twitter profile. This allows you to reach prospects who don’t even follow you, which is a huge benefit of Social Media Marketing.
Commun.it
The idea behind Commun.it is to nurture the communities behind your Social Networks. You can identify followers that are important to your business, categorising followers into: Influencers, Supporters, and Engaged Members. It judges engagement, follow history, and brand mentions, ensuring you do not neglect those that help your Social Media presence.
ViralTag
This is a tool I have been using very effectively for Pinterest. Allowing you to schedule multiple pins from several images directly on a website, it makes marketing your latest blog or content very simple and fast. It’s great for promoting your brand, and has other features, including content discovery and result optimisation.
GaggleAMP
Allowing internal staff to publicise content and posts via their own Social Network profiles, GaggleAmp improves the reach of your content. Employees can join a group or “Gaggle” of their company, and then choose which content to share. Utilizing staff accounts is a very handy move, and GaggleAMP makes this significantly easier, whilst avoiding spamming followers.
Crowdbooster
Boosting an online presence is something many companies struggle with, so Crowdbooster could be the tool to solve this. Aside from the Social Media analytics, Crowdbooster offers suggestions and tools in order to improve your following and reach. You can track the growth of the audience in question, allowing you to act as a leader of a community, rather than merely maintaining updates with important things to say.
SocialFlow
Content is king has become a widespread saying pretty quickly, and SocialFlow states that distribution is the key to the kingdom; and they are not wrong. By optimizing posts and content for certain times, you can appeal to customers whilst they are online, with relevant content they will be genuinely interested in. Analysing user behaviour is an incredibly useful aspect of SocialFlow, and it also suggests which posts to promote with paid advertising, in order for the best Social success.
Cyfe
Touted as the “All-In-One Business Dashboard”, Cyfe is a very powerful tool. It features, real-time reports, widgets to pull data from other services, and the ability to monitor websites and social media in one place. In this way, you can use other tools and services in conjunction; by linking it to YouTube, Bitly, Google Analytics, and more.
SproutSocial
This is another tool that has been gaining traction fast, and it’s not hard to see why. SproutSocial encompasses management and engagement of Social Media in one place, with features including Social Media monitoring, analytics, engagement, and scheduling. Group trends and audience demographics are very useful statistics in managing your Social Media efforts.
Tweepi
An excellent tool for your Twitter account, Tweepi allows you to keep your account fresh and uncluttered. You can see who has unfollowed you, return follows to your own followers, and see what accounts have been inactive for a long time. Another feature Tweepi has is the “force unfollow”, which may sound harsh, but can get rid of the spam accounts who may be following your account.
Hootsuite
One of the classic Social Media tools; there’s a reason it’s one of the most popular. From scheduling to browsing, it’s one of the most effective Social Media Management tools available, and is also very simple to use when looking for content across different Social Networks in customisable streams. Combining this with the Bookmarklet in Chrome makes life very simple in updating your page, and keeping your fans up-to-date.
Followerwonk
An app from the people at Moz, Followerwonk allows you to explore and grow your virtual Social circles; but the killer feature is being able to find and engage with influencers in your particular field or area of interest. This can be a very good way to increase your reach and following, with people that really matter.
Tweriod
If you find your tweets often go unnoticed, then Tweriod could help you out. Tweriod looks at your tweets, and the engagement levels on each individual tweet, to determine when is best for you to send out updates. Not only this, but it also analyses your followers’ tweets, to ensure they will see yours.
Jelly
A relatively new app, Jelly aims to be a Social search engine, based on images, maps, and friends. As a brand, this platform can be used to engage with people in your local area, and engage on a platform that others have not embraced. It may be very worthwhile to jump in whilst it’s new; because it’s set to become pretty big shortly.
To see what Social Media Metrics you should really be measuring, read up here.
Have you used or found any useful Social Media Marketing tools that aren’t listed here? What tools have been most effective in boosting and monitoring your Social Media Campaigns? Let us know in the comments below, or over on Twitter @XanthosDigital
