6 Social Media Tools for 2015
There are many different tools and resources available to the social media marketer. With the New Year, we wanted to provide you a list of which ones are the best for reach, efficiency, and analytics. The answers are a combination of hot new inventions along with good old standbys. Some tools and resources on our list are free while others have a cost associated with them. It is important when evaluating paid tools for your business that you can justify paying for a tool because of its robust features and abilities. You may already use social media management tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social. Those platforms are amazing and helpful to all social media teams, today we are talking about some tools and resources to use in addition to or in conjunction with them. Here is our list of social media tools and resources for 2015:
3 FREE Social Media Tools:
- IFTTT
IFTT stands for If This Then That. You can access the thousands of “recipes” they have on their website www.IFTTT.com. The recipes are actually sets of coding for things you want to happen between your social media channels. You can use it to connect platforms, such as “if I post to Twitter, then automatically post to Tumblr.” Of course, social media automation can be a bit tricky because you always need to represent a social, human side to your social channels. Experiment what works for your company and your social media goals. However, IFTTT can be used to send you alerts to certain triggers or interactions with your brand online. For example, “If the business gets retweeted” or “if someone tags my business on Facebook” then send me a text message. You can also have IFTT automatically send images or tweets to your Evernote account. Other practical uses for IFTTT include automated daily weather alerts, sports scores, and much more. It is incredibly easy to set up your recipes; you just click on them, connect your channels and allow permissions.
- Compfight
This sight will revolutionize your social media, blogging, and content creation departments! It helps you search the web for royalty free images that you can use for your social channels. We all know how important images are to your social media strategy; it has been proven that images attract more attention and create more social engagement. Many social media marketers can spend a great deal of time searching for creative commons images. The alternative is spending money purchasing images or having your creative department spend time creating and designing them. Compfight is a fast and free alternative that will make posting much quicker, easier, and more effective.
- Komfo
Komfo is a free Facebook analytics tool that offers up easy to read and analyze statistics and information about your Facebook campaigns. This provides you with that much needed insight into what is happening with your campaigns. You will see at a glance what is happening, which are performing best, what needs tweaking, etc. If you visit their website www.freeanalytics.komfo.com you can instantly get a free report and see how this tool will work for you.
3 Paid Social Media Tools:
Most of the paid tools out there do offer a free version or a free trial, so before you count out paying for a service, be sure to evaluate it to see if it can work for your business and bring in a great return on investment that eclipses the small cost involved in a tool that makes things easier and more efficient for your marketing team.
Everyware
Everyware is a social app for consumers and features a dashboard for local businesses to communicate with their customers like never before. It combines several aspects of other applications like check-ins, online reviews, deals or special offers, and managing appointments or reservations. The business dashboard incorporates a robust CRM tool that allows businesses to manage customers and communicate with them. It puts appointment scheduling at the tip of consumers’ fingers along with social media access, reviews, and check-ins. Many of the deals offered to customers are based on social check-ins done through the app to reward loyalty. The Everyware app is free for everyone, there are paid options for businesses to receive access to this revolutionary tool.
Isentia
Isentia offers a suite of different social media tools with an international flare, if your company operates in APAC countries, this is where Isentia’s targeted specialty comes in. Different countries have very different opinions of social media because of the diverse cultural differences as well as the different government regulations. Isentia helps you navigate through those complexities and become efficient in each different country. Their suite of tools offers everything from getting started, management, media monitoring, press release tools, and analytics to measure all your marketing efforts. When you visit their website, you can choose the country you want to focus on and then see the list of services available in each country. The list of Asia – Pacific Countries they specialize in include Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, and China.
ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter offers both free and paid plans to help your business’ Twitter strategy. They already help many large brands like PayPal, GE, American Express, and Virgin Media use Twitter more efficiently. The features of the ManageFlitter tool include:
- Account Cleanup: This includes unfollowing people who aren’t following you and inactive accounts as well as unfollowing or blocking fake or spam accounts.
- Grow Your Account: This includes finding the right accounts to follow, searching for and following or engaging those who use specific hashtags or keywords.
- Analytics & Reporting: This includes account analytics, a list of unfollows, and email reports.
- Tweeting & Engagement: This includes the PowerPost and Bulk Management features which allows you to schedule Tweets to the calculated times when your followers are most likely to see them. It also sets recurring posts, rotates them and has a bulk import feature with a unified inbox account that alerts you to all this data and information.
- Business Features: This includes a permission management function, priority support availability, and an account export feature that allows you to download the details on everyone you are following.
Summary
Any business who ventures into social media marketing must use tools in some way to take on such a daunting task. Tools and resources can help replace hours of time wasted. Just as you would test marketing campaigns, you should test out marketing tools to see which ones work best for your business. Don’t shy away from paid tools either. Most of them offer free trials and allow you to see how they can work for you so that you can decide if it is worth the investment.
