Top 10 Tools For Managing Your Social Media Accounts

By Albert Costill at Search Engine Journal:

Attempting to juggle each and every one of your social media accounts can be tricky, scary, and time-consuming. For example, while you’re busy updating your Facebook status, you might have forgotten to favorite a tweet. Speaking of tweets, when is the best time to send one out to followers? Ugh. It can seriously give you a migraine.

Thankfully, we live in a world and time where developers are rectifying that problem! Now, there are plenty of tools that can easily sync with all of our social media accounts so that we can update and monitor all of accounts in convenient location. The only downside is that some great tools have been disabled or acquired by some of the major brands – TweetDeck belongs to Twitter, Summify was acquired and will be shut down by Twitter, for example. But, that doesn’t mean that you still can’t find software to manage all of your social media accounts.

To make your life easier, are here the top 10 tools for managing your social media accounts.


10. Crowdbooster

Unlike other selections on this list, Crowdbooster focuses on gathering data from your Facebook and Twitter feeds. While it will not compile different social media accounts into one convenient location, it will give you some vital information regarding your social media strategy, such as when people are most likely to view your latest images or video uploads. Other features include being able to analyze impressions, total reach, and engagement. This will allow you to modify and improve your strategy by knowing what it working and what is not. Another cool feature is receiving alerts on new Twitter members who may be interested in you or your brand.

Unfortunately, Crowdbooster does not offer a free option, but the lowest plan will only set you back $9 a month and allows up to 50,000 followers all together. It may be worth the investment if you run a business.


9. SocialFlow

If you run a business or an online marketing campaign, you already know how important it is to share content on social media. By utilizing its own unique optimization algorithm that taps into your Twitter and Facebook data, SocialFlow takes into consideration three factors: “relevant message (which of your messages is most likely to connect), right audience (who’s online now), and right time (when’s the perfect moment to publish this content).” In short, SocialFlow makes sure your message is sent out during the most optimum time.

SocialFlow is another service you’ll have to pay for, but they offer flexible plans that begin around $99 a month.


8. Bitly

Bitly does a lot more than just shortening links that are posted to your social media accounts, which keeps them neat and clean. It also features real time-analytics, bookmarking your favorite sites and pages and having the ability to track clicks. Bitly works across multiple platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, and is free. Yep. Free.


7. Everypost

Everypost is a handy app that basically allows you to post all of your updates onto the major social networks from one place at one time. Simply write your message, add photos or videos, and hashtags then send off to Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, or via e-mail (even all at the same time, if you want). Another cool features is the Twitter text shortener. This will automatically shorten tweets so that they are under 140 characters. While there may be some glitches to correct, this is a useful, and free, app.


6. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another nifty tool that can manage, post, monitor, and analyze multiple social media accounts from one location. For example, you could search for content within its Feedly integration, schedule posts, and reply to messages on Facebook and Twitter. You can also monitor messages across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn personal profiles all through on streaming inbox. But, that’s not all. Sprout Social also offers analytics so that you can visualize important metrics.

You can sign up for a free trial, but after that you’ll have to select one of three packages that range from $39, $59 or $99 per month. It’s a little higher cost than other tools, but can be a great investment for businesses that are super social.


5. Buffer

Buffer is one of the most popular social media message scheduling and sharing applications available. With one easy click you’ll be able to share content and schedule posts via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. Basically, it allows you to stagger content throughout the day so that social media feeds have consistent updates. And, there’s analytics about engagement and reach of your posts.

Buffer is free, but only for a short period.  However, you can schedule ahead of time, which is really handy. For just $10 a month you can schedule as many posts as you want, use up to 12 social profiles, and have two team members assigned to one account.


4. Spredfast

Spredfast is an outstanding tool if you’re looking to measure data gathered from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr, such as being able to see how many people you’ve reached and whether or not your target audience is engaging with you. The data is clearly presented in formatted graphs. Besides the advanced analytics tools, there’s other useful features, like a calendar that informs when the optimal tweeting times occur.


3. Tweepi

Of all the social media platforms, Twitter can be the most daunting. If that’s the case for you, Tweepi is just what you have been looking for. There’s a quick management tool which will allow to flush unfollowers, cleanup inactives, reciprocate by following, and follow new interesting tweets. A simple, and sometimes brutal, way to keep your Twitter account tidy.

There are Silver ($7.49 a month) and Platinum ($14.99 a month) to choose from. However, if you purchase Tweepi annually, it’s 17% cheaper.


2. SocialOomph

SocialOomph has the ability to schedule tweets for the entire day and auto-follow your new followers, so you can something other than schedule tweets and follow people. You can also use the dashboard to combine Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plurk, and your blog into one spot to schedule posts or monitor social media activity.

While the app has a free version, there’s a paid “professional” option that features a ton of helpful tools to boost your social media productivity.


1. HootSuite

If you’re looking for the best, accept no substitutes. HootSuite is the most popular social media management tool for a reason. Besides being able to execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one web-based dashboard, you can also manage social media, track conversations, and measure campaign results. HootSuite also offers a custom built-in analytics system and the capability to schedule posts on all platforms.

Hootsuite offers a free, pro ($8.99 per month), and enterprise options to suit the needs of individuals, small businesses, and large organizations.

What is your favorite social media management tool?





Via Search Engine Journal

10 Top Social Media Monitoring & Analytics Tools

By Melissa O'Connor at Tweek Your Biz:

Social media is quickly becoming a main focus of marketing for businesses. Social media can be an excellent tool to build a community around your product or service, expand your target market, and to listen to what your customers want. It’s clear that social media is valuable, but measuring  ROI proves to be a challenge.

And, with all of the statistics available, it can be difficult to distill what is most important and useful. It can also be out of budget for many businesses to employ an expert or any of the robust reporting tools that are available.

There are some simple ways for monitoring activity on social media platforms. Some obvious ways are internal methods such as monitoring Facebook likes, retweets on Twitter, basically tracking what your customers are interested in and changing what isn’t working. I would suggest making a weekly or a monthly plan outlining status updates and competitions etc. There are also external sites which are ideal for monitoring and analytics.

Useful external sites for social media monitoring and analytics:-

# 1. Social Mention

Social Mention will allow you to track and measure who is talking about you, your company, your product, or any topic related to your industry. Social Mention pulls data from hundred + social media platforms to give you the most accurate, real-time information landscape in real-time.

# 2. Tweet Deck

TweetDeck is an effective and useful tool that allows you to arrange feeds from all of your social networks in one place using the TweetDeck dashboard. You can also schedule tweets and set-up customizable feeds for your social search needs. Lists can also be created of the people you follow. These lists can allow you to manage different target groups you want to interact with and keep an eye on what’s being tweeted about.

# 3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is my personal favourite. It’s easy to use and allows you to organize and execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. Hootsuite enables organizations launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audiences.

Key social network integrations include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and  Google+ Pages, plus a suite of social content apps for YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and more.

Hootsuite’s geo-location and geo- targeting can help get your business more seen on social media platforms. HootSuite also offers tools to help multiple collaborators be assigned to manage your social media accounts more securely. Analytics tools are also available on Hootsuite to get more of an insight into your businesses participation on social media platforms.

# 4. Twilert

Twilert is a Twitter monitoring application that monitors all mentions of your chosen keywords across the Twitter-sphere. What’s best about Twilert is that it doesn’t simply monitor @mentions or hashtags, but monitors all words within a tweet. So you will never miss out on anything you are searching for. It’s an easy platform to use for social analytics. You can sign in to Twilert with your Google or Twitter account. The keywords you search can be sent directly to your email address.

What’s great about Twilert as well is that you can do an advanced search for any topic. You can choose a particular geographical area. Maybe a certain target audience you haven’t quite targeted yet that you want to do some market research on, to see if your product or service meets their needs.  You can search by peoples attitude either positive, negative or asking a question.  This could be quite useful. See picture below to get a better understanding of the advanced search tool for Twilert.

# 5. Sprout Social

Sprout Social lets you monitor your business & manage conversations with one simple marketing analytics tool. Publish & schedule updates across social channels with a single click. Manage teams, large social channels, tasks and assignments to make life a bit easier.

Sprout Social allows you to monitor your business efficiently and effectively and help manage&grow your social presence across different platforms. Sprout Social integrates with Twitter, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, FourSquare and other networks where your target market could be engaging with businesses similar to yours. Other useful tools on Sprout Social are contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, analytics.

Sprout Social offers a thirty day free trial. So give it a try if you think it would be a useful analytics tool for your business.

# 6. Social Oomph

Social Oomph is a useful marketing tool especially for Twitter. Twitter is an excellent way for a business to build relationships with customers and assist in retaining them as well.

There are different tools that will let you manage multiple Twitter profiles and you can configure lots of features such as Auto Direct Message, Auto Follow and Auto unfollow.

If it’s suitable for your business then I would suggest sending an auto direct message to all your new followers. You have more than likely been sent one by someone you have followed. Here an example: Thanks for connecting here on Twitter, will love to see you on Facebook [Link]

Twitter users will usually follow you because you follow them back and later on if they unfollow you. Social Oomph’s Twitter auto unfollow tool will come in handy to help clean up your newsfeed.

# 7. Sysomos

Sysomos another great social media analytics tool for businesses. Sysomos is the greek word for “everything together “. You will be provided with intelligence and insights needed to measure results and ultimately make decisions on what’s working and what’s not working.

Sysomos collects data from blogs, Twitter, social networks, messages, boards, wikis and major news sources. Sysomos give you the ability to notice the tone of conversations and identify opinions by gender, age and location.

Some of Sysomos’ products include: Heartbeat, a social media monitoring and measurement tool. Heartbeat provides constantly updated snapshots of social media conversations delivered using a variety of user-friendly and intuitive graphics. Sysomos MAP, and Traffic Analytics. You can request a demo here.

# 8. Brand Monitor

Brand Monitor is an easy-to-use social media monitoring and engagement platform. Brand Monitor provides a powerful blend of consumer brand choice, multi-dimensional insights and relative acumen. A dashboard is available for you to view weekly trends, reaction meter, posts volume, reaction graph and top referrals. A graph with positive and negative response trends for the past month can also be viewed.

Sentiments can be manually updated and Brand Monitor is capable of learning this and using this information to assign sentiment for future posts. An email can be sent to you daily, weekly and monthly that will keep you updated. Dashboard Charts and other data can be easily exported into an editable Excel sheet or CSV file.

# 9. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free Web analytics service that provides statistics and easy to use analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and analytical marketing purposes. There is an endless amount of data available to analyse on Google Analytics. I will recommend some resources that will be beneficial for your business.

• Monitoring traffic sources: Tracking which keywords are driving the most traffic to your website is essential. Using these keywords then throughout your website will help you rank higher in SEO
• Monitoring referring sites: Understanding which websites are sending the most quality traffic to your website will allow you to focus more effort and time on those sites, and less of your time on under performing websites.
• Monitoring the types of visitors: Analysing how much of your website traffic is new visitors against returning visitors? This information will help you run certain marketing activities aimed at new visitors or returning visitors. A dedicated part of your website could be created to inform returning visitors of new products or services available by your business
• Monitoring popular pages. Analysing what pages are performing best on your website will give you an idea to what your visitors are most interested in and what needs work on your website
• Monitoring visits. Analysing what days visitors are coming to visit your website will allow you to publish new content or launch a new marketing activity on those days in order to attract the most attention
• Monitoring geographical location. Google Analytics presents data that will let you analyse the top ten countries that visit your page. This could be useful data for your business that may help you decide on entering into a new market or increase your product or service offering in a new market.

# 10. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is another effective monitoring system to analyse social media. You can track anything you want. It can be a useful way for finding out what’s being said about you or your company. You can keep track of articles you write under your name; monitoring the competition or simply to keep up to date on any given topic.

You can set up Google Alerts to monitor certain keywords, such as your blog name, your business name and your personal name, and you will receive an e-mail any time they find those keywords in their search. With Google Alerts, you can be instantly notified when and where any bad content was placed on any social media platform and be able to respond accordingly.

It is essential for every organization to monitor and track what is being said about them. It is especially important to interact with customers through social media platforms and analyse any areas of their social media platforms that need to be improved and essentially keep up to this on this very fast paced environment.

Obviously there are lots more Social Media monitoring and analytics tools. I’d love to hear any recommendations you have below.

6 Facebook Tools To Update Your Pages

By Kristi Hines at KISSmetrics:
One of the things that the new Facebook pages design makes obvious above all others is the lack of updates on a Facebook page. While updating your Facebook page on Facebook itself is recommended, many businesses will still prefer to use a social media management tool for the sake of productivity and ease of use. This post will show you six tools that social media experts and marketing agencies use to update their Facebook pages.

Why You Should Use Facebook

Before we get into third-party tools and applications, I want to suggest that you use Facebook itself to update your Facebook page for the following reasons.
EdgeRank
Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank to determine which updates are shown in your fans’ news feeds. You can learn more about it in this post from Econsultancy. One thing that EdgeRank has the potential of doing is lowering the value of an update from a third-party tool and prioritizing updates that are made directly on Facebook. This means that pages with updates from third-party apps may not get as much engagement.
Users Can Hide Third-Party Apps
Facebook users have the choice to hide updates made by third-party apps from their news feed entirely.

If a friend, subscription, or page annoys a user with updates from a particular third-party app, that user might hide any updates from that app altogether. This means that they would never see your page’s updates from that app.
Updates Lumped Together
You also have to worry about updates from third-party tool getting clumped together. This doesn’t happen with all apps, but it does with some, especially if there are an over-abundance of updates from one particular app.

This will likely lead to less interaction with your updates when people come to your Facebook page.

When You Should Use Third Party Tools

If there are good reasons not to use third-party tools, then why would you want to use them at all? The fact is, some will simply not want or be able to make the commitment to going to Facebook on a regular basis and make updates. Updating your Facebook page using a third-party tool would be better than not updating your page at all. The last thing you would want a visitor to your page to see is something like this.

With all of this in mind, here are some of the top tools that social media experts, brands, and agencies are using to update their pages. Keep in mind that most use these apps in addition to making updates on their Facebook page from Facebook itself.

Argyle Social

Argyle Social allows you to schedule and publish updates across top social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can also have your latest blog post automatically delivered to those social networks using your RSS feed. They even offer a way to brand your updates.

Instead of seeing that the update comes from Argyle Social, you can have your brand name appear instead with a link to your website. Argyle Social includes a lot of additional features for enterprises and agencies, including analytics, social ROI measurement, and collaboration options. Pricing starts at $300 per month. See it in action on the Facebook pages for Convince & Convert and Exploring Social Media.

Buffer

Buffer is one of my favorite tools – it allows you to schedule and publish updates. Unlike other platforms where you have to schedule each update at a specific time, Buffer allows you to set up a specific scheduling pattern. When you add an update to your Buffer, it will be set out at the next available time slot.

Updates can be sent to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. You can use Buffer to update one Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn account for free with up to 10 updates scheduled at a time. There is also a Pro plan for $10 per month that allows you to have up to six social media accounts and up to 50 scheduled updates or a Premium plan for $99 per month that allows you to have unlimited social media accounts and scheduled updates. See it in action on the Facebook page for Convince & Convert.

Dlvr.it

Dlvr.it allows you to add your blog feed to be updated on your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, StatusNet, and MySpace accounts. Essentially, every time you publish a new post, it will be added to the social accounts you specified. It is a simple and free service to use to get your latest blog posts delivered to your social media accounts. See it in action on the Windmill Networking Facebook page.

HootSuite

HootSuite allows you to schedule and publish updates across multiple social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace, and Foursquare. HootSuite also allows you to add RSS feeds to your account to update your social networks when new posts are available from your own blog as well as others. You can use HootSuite for free with up to five social profiles, or go with a Pro plan for $5.99 per month for unlimited social profiles, RSS feeds, and more. See it in action on the Facebook pages for Mashable and Mari Smith.

Networked Blogs

NetworkedBlogs allows you to automatically update your Facebook and Twitter accounts with your latest blog post. You will have to verify that you are the author of the blog by temporarily adding a widget to your blog or asking your Facebook friends to confirm that you are the author / owner. See it in action on the InsideFacebook.com Facebook page.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social allows you to schedule and publish updates to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. You can also connect RSS feeds to your account and have them regularly update your social media networks when new content is available. Sprout Social also includes influence and engagement monitoring on your social networks so you can see how influential you are. Their plans are $9 per month to manage up to 10 social profiles, $39 per month for 20 profiles, $59 per month for 40 profiles, and $899 per month for unlimited social profiles plus additional features. See it in action on the 919 Marketing Facebook page.

These are just a few of the tools that you can use to update your Facebook page. Share your thoughts and favorite tools for updating your Facebook page in the comments.



About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing for personal, professional, and business bloggers. You can follow her on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook.