Let’s face it. The daily demands of running a business and managing multiple social media accounts can eat up a big chunk of your time.
Nearly all marketers use social media in their marketing mix, which means more and more businesses are getting actively involved. Business is always affected by the consumer environment, and social media makes a great environment for leads and prospects.
As an entrepreneur, your goal is to find where these future customers hang out, and put your ideas in front of them. Since most of your customers like to use at least a few social platforms, this applies even if your target demographis is 55-64 year olds, which is the fastest growing age bracket on Twitter.
Thankfully, there are tools to help you boost your social media productivity and marketing:
1. Rignite
Rignite is a neat little tool that I recently discovered. It’s actually a full-blown social media dashboard that lets you control and monitor your social media activities all under one roof.
With Rignite, you can monitor multiple social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram etc. You can chat and collaborate with your social media team inside Rignite, so it’s perfect for larger teams. But even if you have a small team, Rignite will pleasantly surprise you.
One cool feature is “Schedule Profile Groups” where you can schedule multiple social media posts for different platforms. Rignite Groups are a set of social profiles.
You can also connect your Rignite profile with Feedly to find interesting content, curate and post it.
The cherry on the top is Rignite’s Campaigns feature. Set up a New Campaign to schedule a series of posts, grow your email list, host contests for your fans, or promote a discount.
Campaigns run on auto-pilot once set. For example, you can create a series of posts to promote your content or a new blog post (super-helpful if you’re a blogger!) across multiple platforms on a chosen day and time.
With their campaign-level analysis, you can also know what’s working and what’s not.
To monitor certain keyword trends on social media, you can Add New Stream under Monitor tab from the left-hand menu. Below, I have added two new streams to my Rignite (Blogging and Digital Marketing) to monitor what’s happening in those areas on Twitter.
All in all, I think Rignite offers a ton of features to enhance your social media marketing experience.
Price: Free trial for 14 days. Paid plans start from $28/mo per user.
2. Topsy
It can be too hard to make sense of the billion tweets on Twitter. EnterTopsy, a free Twitter analytics tool to search, monitor and analyze tweets.
You can find tweets, links, photos, videos or shares by a person or on a specific topic. This is a wealth of data if you want to find out what’s trending and being shared. But most importantly, Topsy can also help you with your blogger outreach campaign.
Price: Free.
3. Mention
Mention is a real-time media monitoring app that lets you listen, react quickly, collaborate and analyze your online presence.
Mention is a great alternative to Google Alerts. According toWordStream, Google Alerts apparently works if the following conditions are met:
Google Alerts only sends you email if new articles, webpages or blog posts make it into the top ten Google News results, the top twenty Google Web Search results or top ten Google Blog Search results for your query. If the top results remain the same for a while, you won't receive email on your topic.
That means that with Google Alerts, you will not receive an alert for every mention out there. With Mention, things are brighter. The number of results are way more than that reported by Google Alerts. Mention also takes into account any social mentions you may have had.
You can monitor Facebook, Twitter, News, Blogs, Videos, Forums, Images and Web, but their best feature is reporting. If you’re a big brand or company this means gold for you. For example, let’s say you’ve recently launched a new product and you notice some cool new spikes in your report. You can now attribute where those spikes came from (the launch) and whether it worked well for you.
When receiving Mentions from Twitter, you can turn on a feature to track your Twitter name but exclude your own tweets from alerts. Pretty cool, right?
Price: Free 14-day trial. Basic plan free for one user, one alert and 250 mentions/mo. Paid plans available too.
4. Twtrland
Twtrland is a simple tool to discover new people on Twitter. Sign up via your Twitter account for free.
You’ll be taken to your dashboard that shows your activity, popularity, and communicative scores.You’ll also see your top content that did well on Twitter (based on all time or recent posts).
The Network tab shows a break down of your followers by celebrities, power users, casual and novices; location; age; skill and gender.
Price: Free 14-day trial. Paid plans start at $49/mo.
5. LikeAlyzer
There are many tools to analyze Twitter posts, but what about Facebook, the largest social media network on earth?
Enter LikeAlyzer, a tool to analyze and monitor your Facebook page. If you’re big on Facebook and use it to drive traffic to your website or blog, give this one a try.
You can analyze your competitor’s Facebook page and compare that to yours. LikeAlyzer assigns a unique score to pages. In the above example, PickYourGoals Facebook page has a “LikeRank” of 63 out of 100.
Here are the things LikeAlyzer reviews on your page:
1. Page Information: Checks whether you have filled your profile including any milestones.
2. Page Performance: Your overall performance, the number of likes you need to engage better, and whether you have a big enough audience to find success on Facebook.
3. Posts by Page: Talks about posts per day; timing; likes, comments and shares per post; length; curiosity etc.
4. Posts by Others: How you’re dealing with fan responses.
The report tells you how well you’re doing, and also suggests areas to focus on to make improvements. You can repeat the process for a competitor page and see if they have a higher score and how they are doing better than you. Pretty cool!
Price: Free.
6. Swayy
Swayy finds you the best content on the web so you can share it with your fans and followers on social media, thus saving you time on curation.
Add topics of your interest (niches), hit submit and sit back and relax to receive a daily dose of best content to share with your audience.
With a paid plan, you can add multiple dashboards inside Swayy (a community manager’s heaven!) if you manage more than on social accounts.
Once done, you’ll receive a daily email with the best content to go around in your chosen topics.
Swayy dashboard also shows how your shares are doing.
Price: Free for one dashboard. Paid plans start from $9/mo with two dashboards.
There you go – 6 tools that will boost your social media marketing and productivity, so you can relax and focus on other important activities in business.
