Hey Girl. Social Media Explained (10 Great Tools)
To succeed in today’s connected world, you need to build a community around your company, brand, and products. Listening to what your customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about you is key to getting great results from your social media campaigns.
Determining which tools are right for you requires a clear definition of your objectives. Some are real-time, highly customized dashboards that enable you to manage multiple accounts, use shared work spaces, and respond on multiple social networks with one click. Others are simple, effective, and lightweight, and provide the right amount of functionality.
- Icerocket (Free) | A free resource for brand monitoring, it taps the Web, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, and delivers easy-to-read results in one page.
- Vocus ($) | Cloud marketing and analytics platform that looks at social, search, email, and PR, and delivers real-time marketing opportunities in the form of leads, prospects, social media conversations, curated content and inbound media inquiries.
- TweetDeck (Free) | Very similar to HootSuite, only without all the bells and whistles, this client enables you to tweet and track mentions, people, and keywords.
- PinReach ($) | Measures your Pinterest influence by giving you an overall score and easy-to-read charts and tables that show your most popular pins and boards.
- Pinpuff (Free) | Similar to Klout but focusing only on the Pinterest, it measures the how people share images about your brand and the influence that results.
- Netvibes (Free and $) | A platform that tracks clients, customers, competitors, and your reputation across media sources, analyzes live results with 3rd party reporting tools, and provides media monitoring dashboards for brand clients.
- HootSuite (Free and $) | A social media management system that enables teams to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one dashboard. Includes audience identification tools, the ability to streamline workflow, and custom reports. I use HootSuite to manage my company’s Twitter account.
- Google Alerts (Free) | Get email updates of the latest relevant Google results (Web, news, etc.) based on your queries.
- BackTweets (Free) | Track how many people are talking about you, who’s talking, and what they’re saying. You can search through a tweet archive for URLs sent via Twitter, including results for full URL links, shortened URLs, and URLs without the “www” prefix.
- Buffer (Free and $) | An app that manages multiple Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, with the ability to set a tweeting or updating schedule unique to each. Includes detailed analytics for all your posts.
Photo credit and many chuckles: http://socialmediagururyangosling.tumblr.com/
