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4,722 viewsWhen it comes to selecting the best social media management tool for your commercial use, there is nothing called ‘The Best Solution’, so far, in our web repository. Every tool has something unique to offer. So, you can’t really depend on tool comparison charts to decide on the appropriate one for your business. Social activity trends and tool USPs keep changing with time.
Nothing to worry about! You can definitely find a tool that provides you with almost all essential features you deserve at an affordable price.
So why settle for less? Let’s help you shop a good social media management tool today. Of course, we will not talk around any particular SMM tool in this post but take you through the essentials of selecting a good one that keeps you and your business healthy and happy.
Buying an SMM tool is similar to purchasing a car. You need to have certain basic features and functional benefits included in every model. Then, you can think of adding optional or advanced capabilities to leverage maximum benefit for your investment. Whether you intend to opt for premium social media relationship tool or choose from some free social media management tools, here is the list of essential features you should consider.
Centralized Analytics
Running social media campaigns without realizing their tangible results is of no use. You need to track KPIs and metrics (such as clicks, retweets, likes, comments, favorites, shares) of your SM accounts on a regular basis and take decisions based on the changes in performance charts over time. Major social channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn have their built-in analytics section to help you with social media strategies.
However, using a premium quality analytics tool ensures that you combine all your social analytics data in a single tool and generate a multitude of custom reports for your business use. quintly, Hootsuite and SimplyMeasured work wonders in providing analytics data at a granular level. For example, here is a snapshot of quintly’s dashboard showing social analytics in graphical format. This gives you an overall idea of how a tool interface looks like.
Such analytics tools allow you to measure social media messaging using tags and URL shorteners. It is time-saving and effective. Dedicate five minutes of your time to read an article listing 48 social media KPIs.
Activity Monitoring
How is your target audience rating your social media posts?
Are they getting the right amount of impressions?
Which social channels seem most promising to your business?
The SM tool you choose for your business must give you accurate and real-time information on the user behavior – through custom reports and dashboards.
Some of the advanced social listening features which you should definitely consider are:
- audience reach by demographics and location
- sentiment analysis
- engagement score
- social influence measurements
Social Mention and Tweet Reach are two such tools doing great job in this domain.
Seamless Collaboration
Collaborating on tasks through a centralized dashboard is something every SM manager would like to implement for his or her team. In an organization, it is important that every social media team member adopts a streamlined process for assigning work and delivering scheduled reports.
Hootsuite, Simply Measured, quintly are a few such tools that make your overall governance and reporting job much easier and effective.
Apart from using the social listening capabilities of such tools you can also join real-time conversations between team members and manage your assignments effortlessly.
Automated Scheduling, Tagging and Workflow
Isn’t it a great idea to have all your social media content published in due time without waiting to post or monitor each one? A deserving tool does all the repetitive and mundane tasks for you. It can free up a lot of time for you so that you can focus on the core strategic work.
In addition to auto-scheduling your social media posts, you may also want to organize your social mentions, and add automatic tags to provide context to a conversation. A great tool would help you create workflow to manage the activities of your social team members. You can also set automatic alerts and assign mentions to people, keeping your customer response time low.
Competitive Benchmarking
You are never better until you compare yourself with your competitors. Social benchmarking keeps you aware of what your competitors are doing today. It can help you forge new strategies to rank higher in the social acceptance chart. A good tool would not only help you measure your own page performance but also give you resourceful insights on your competitors’ activities. With such tools you should be able to add multiple social media pages or profiles that you want to track and compare.
Location Search Services
Geo-targeting of social media message is crucial to any business.
Your social media tool must help you determine:
- when to post new feeds
- how to find new customers from targeted locations
- what regional factors to consider while responding to a customer’s request.
Most of the SM tools mentioned above have the ability to filter posts, profiles, and audience responses by location.
On Facebook and Twitter, you can filter posts by location and find relevant people who have turned on location services on their profile. Foursquare or Swarm app can also help you find location based social media users for your business.
Multi-tool Integration Capability
Today, you rarely find a social media management tool that is isolated from other popular apps, growing in the market. Whether you need to integrate your social media feeds with a CRM tool, an email app, other social platforms like Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, as well as your marketing ecosystem, your SMM platform must aid you in every opportunity. Oktopost is one such popular tool that seamlessly integrates with 3rd party applications like Salesforce, Marketo, Act-On, Hubspot, Feedly, and more on the go.
Smart Reporting
For a social media marketer, there is no substitute to smart tailor-made reporting capabilities.
Does your SMM platform help in the assessment of your team using the right performance metrics?
Does it provide you with highly configurable, yet simple, and comprehensive reports at one go?
Do you put lots of manual effort to create a social media reporting template every time you need to send a report to your management?
You can overcome this painstaking reporting process.
Your social media management platform should be equipped with automated report scheduling feature and white-labeled reporting templates so that you save time. Creating different reporting format and scheduling them as per business need is now a one-time activity. Just set it once and forget it until you need a new template next time.
I am sure that our great audience would come up with more features of social media management tools they find useful. I would appreciate if you can mention a few of them in the comments section below.
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