For most businesses, social media marketing is something that shouldn’t be ignored. Depending on your audience, there’s generally a social media platform that actively engages with them, and offers a channel for you to engage with them, too.
While finding a platform is only half the battle in connecting with your customers, analysis of the information you post through social media tools is equally as important. This analysis helps you understand what works and what doesn’t; what people positively respond to, and what they ignore or have very little interaction with.
There is almost an endless number of tools for social media marketers that can help you sift through all of the information, speed up your posting, focus your messaging, and more.
Here are 9 “less obvious” tools that you may be unaware of:
If you know anything about social media marketing you know that Google Analytics is a very important piece of the marketing puzzle. If you’ve used, or attempted to use, Google Analytics you also know that the sheer amount of data it presents can be overwhelming. Quill Engage is your new best friend when it comes to sifting through all of your Google Analytics data.
It’s a very customizable program that delivers the most important and insightful information from your Google Analytics profile to your email inbox in a scheduled report. It delivers things you’d expect like traffic growth, decline, where traffic originates, what posts/pages are the most popular, etc. It also uniquely uses a sort of A.I. that explains your information in a simple to understand report.
One of the most challenging aspects of reaching your audience is knowing what to post to grab the users’ attention. The Internet is the busiest place on earth with information that speeds around so fast it’s hard to stay current. Nexalogy is a free platform that helps you make smart decisions about the type of content that will appeal to your target market.
Essentially, it analyses information streams from your social media followers and other sources to understand what they’re talking about, what’s current, what’s being shared the most, etc. Through this analysis you’re presented with output that includes a plethora of data that can help you focus your posts to appeal to your customer base.
MavSocial helps with brand promotion, website traffic, and creating leads through one easy to use platform. Essentially, it allows you to manage lost of social media accounts (both personal and business) all in one application, and lets you do things like schedule posts, measure performance, and analyze ROI through output and reporting.
The great thing about MavSocial is that it’s visual-marketing-focused allowing you to post and schedule image updates on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and more.
Here are more social media dashboards to consider including Hootsuite, Oktopost and other. Here are more visual marketing tools to choose from.
Cyfe is multi-purpose business monitoring dashboard that can applied to social media marketing and reputation management.
With it, you can monitor your social media stats (follower growth, uploads growth, likes, etc) on Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, Twitter, Klout, Google Plus, and many more social media platforms.
You can also monitor your brand name mentions or important hashtags using Twitter search, Google Plus search and Google Alerts widgets.
The beauty of it is that you can have ALL these widgets installed on one dashboard to get a bird’s eye view of your stats.
Creating a unique hashtag for your latest campaign or product is a great way to track its success, but sometimes finding all instances of that hashtag can be cumbersome.
TagBoard allows you to track all your hashtag uses across a variety of social media platforms and offers up all of the results in one easy to understand output. It also allows you to easily select that output for various uses like live broadcasts, websites, and more.
BuzzSumo allows you to do research and analysis to find out what’s current in your industry. It helps you understand what content works best for specific topics among a variety of social networking platforms.
It allows you to easily search for terms to help you quickly and efficiently find out what content is performing well is a specific niche with different audiences.
While Google Plus future is not clear yet, today it’s an important venue for businesses to expand their reach.
Circloscope helps you manage your circles on Google+ and bill itself as circles on steroids. It allows you to easily create new circles and filter through existing circles to target your audience appropriately. Creating more refined circles based on past users behavior can help with stats like reach, engagement, and click-through’s.
If the majority of your social media activity is on Facebook and Twitter then Crowdbooster might be useful. It allows you to monitor your social media activity to help you identify useful trends and ways you can reach your audience. You can keep track of followers, influencers, and of course schedule posts.
With a simple and clean interface, Mention does exactly what you’d think. It helps you find mentions of your brand, campaign, product, or whatever else online. It allows you to cast a wide net across many platforms or zero in on something more specific.
Generally, social media marketing is a valuable part of any promotional business effort, and utilizing the right tools can make your efforts that much more valuable. While just about all social media marketing tools offer ways to streamline efforts and save you time, they also offer a variety of ways to reach more specific audiences and better analyze data.
Which social media marketing tools work best for you? Let us know in the comments below!
Images: “Social Media Marketing (SMM), business concept acronym / Shutterstock.com“
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