Social Media Tools – Management and Analysis
A marketing strategy and its associated plan are more than just documents you produce because you have to, they are ‘living’ documents. This means they have to be used, referred to and updated as your marketing progresses, with the help of social media tools. This is particularly true with online marketing where campaigns can last longer but bring in larger profits. Yet because of the investment in time and effort in creating a social media campaign, you need to know that it is doing what you want it to do. How successful is it? What kind of buzz is it generating and which social media channel is the most successful? As the business owner, this is information you need to know.
If you are using social media sites to market your products you have to be able to get statistics on how well they are performing. It’s no good, for example, spending several hours of your day working on Facebook if it turns out the majority of your business is coming from LinkedIn, or Twitter. This is where online analytical tools can help. Some of them are free, some will cost you money, but all of them will give you vital data that you can use to judge the effectiveness of a given campaign. This article will look at some of the new or less-known social media tools available.
Let’s start with the basics: online marketing is all about generating interest in your product or service, you achieve this by getting people interested in what you have to offer and they then register this interest by linking your page or by mentioning you in a post. Likes are all well and good, but these days its a fairly autonomous response. Converting likes into results is extremely difficult and you risk toppling over into becoming a spammer if you are not careful.
No, what you really need to do is track when people are talking about you. Mention is a media monitoring tool that is simple to use, quick to set up and does exactly what is says it will. It lets you know which sites are talking about you and who on those sites is mentioning you. This is a must-have tool in the early days of any online campaign.
Understanding how your campaigns are progressing and then benchmarking them against your competitors is vitally important for any marketing strategy. Google Analytics, LinkedIn and Facebook come some way to providing this information, but they cannot work across platforms very well (if at all). Enter Analytics Pro by Socialbakers. Currently, it will provide statistics on campaigns across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The tool allows to look at channel growth across social media platforms, engagement with your campaigns and comparison against similar campaigns run by other companies.
If your marketing team comprises three or more people, it is important to be able to share data about campaigns among them quickly and effectively. A new tool to the market, Rignite, does just this. Apart from providing stats from across multiple social media channels, it also allows you to assign tasks to members in a team. The team can also be invited to online discussions about the statistics. Rignite, then, is a social media tool for connecting with your social marketing.
