Five Must-Have Social Media Tools For Social Media Marketers

In this guest post, Nital Shah the managing director of Sydney-based search marketing firm Octos, says if you’re in the game of social media and you’re not using these tools then you’re not in the game…

Social media has reached a critical mass in Australia. With more than half of the population now using social, it has become one of the most effective word-of-mouth marketing tools available. It follows that, to succeed in business today, it’s imperative to keep up with developments in the social mediasphere and participate wisely in the social conversation.

When done well, social media exposes your product or service to an entirely new realm of potential fans, keeping your brand front of mind when those all-important purchasing decisions are made. In order to ‘do’ social well, there are a few digital tools that no social media marketer should live without:

Hootsuite

With over ten million users, HootSuite is by far the most popular social media management tool used by businesses to roll out campaigns across multiple social networks from a single web-based dashboard. This platform connects with over 35 popular social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. It allows you to manage all your social networks, track conversations, measure campaign results and schedule messages for future publishing.

Hootsuite is available in two versions: Pro and Enterprise. The first is perfect for small and medium businesses and organisations that need to manage, engage, and measure with a scalable, intuitive platform. The Enterprise version is suitable for large corporations and government entities that require social implementation with regulatory compliance across all facets of the organisation.

Tweepi

Twitter follower maintenance can be a messy, painstaking business. But with a little help from Tweepi, you can cleanup your Twitter profile, grow your following and get rid of obsolete or unwanted followers.

Tweepi helps you increase your number of followers, by pinpointing new Twitter profiles that you should engage with. Using the Tweepi follow function, you can identify and weed out the non-reciprocal Twitter users that you are following.

Simply having followers is not an end unto itself. Social is all about conversation. There’s little use in having followers if they aren’t actively engaged online. Tweepi determines how active users are in the Twittersphere, by observing their tweets and their klout scores. With this insight, you can strategically build a following of highly engaged Twitter users who can help spread the good word about your brand.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social management and engagement platform that allows you to publish seamlessly across networks and devices. With a slick, user-friendly interface, the platform enables you to draft, schedule, queue and post messages to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. Sprout Social has integrated capabilities for shortening links, attaching images, and targeting particular audiences. You can also measure and make sense of your follower engagement patterns with the built-in ViralPost® monitoring and analytics.SproutSocial is available in three tiered versions: Deluxe ($59/month), Premium ($99/month) and Team ($500/month).

Buffer

Buffer is another smart and simple way to schedule content across social media. Unlike Hootsuite and Sprout Social, Buffer is not a comprehensive content dashboard. Rather, it’s a kind of virtual digital queue that you can fill with content for your various social networks and then stagger posting times throughout the day.

The advantage of this platform is that it helps you stick to a consistent social media schedule all week, without having to overthink the delivery times. The Bufferapp also provides analytics to help you measure the engagement and reach of your posts.

Compared with Hootsuite, Bufferapp offers superior scheduling flexibility because you can designate very specific scheduling times and adjust patterns throughout the week. That said, many social media marketers use both platforms – Hootsuite for social listening and Bufferapp for scheduling.

Buzz Bundle

Buzz Bundle is a freeware from linkassistant.com that tracks brand mentions in blogs, Q&A sites, forums, social networks and video sites. By using groups of keywords to order your search results, you can find where people are talking about you, and chime in on the conversation. Once you have configured your search, Buzz Bundle finds all content related to your brand and your specified topics.

Buzz Bundle setup is swift and straightforward. The tool boasts some impressive features, such as unlimited Linkedin, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook scheduling capability. You can also create new social profiles directly from the software.

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These tools help your business to connect with customers in a two-way conversation, to build your brand and engage followers who will filter your marketing messages through their networks. If your brand isn’t engaging customers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and other platforms, you are probably falling behind your competitors who do have social in their marketing mix.

Author Bio: Nital is the founding director at Octos with more than 8+ years of experience under his belt in this field with a profound level of expertise in search strategies, planning and management. He has served big corporate brands of Australia, with Octos the winner of the All Star Summit of 2015. He is a talented and motivated individual who likes to keep everyone around him happy and content. Nital can be connected here on Twitter.