Social media evolved from mere fad status to one of the most effective online marketing tools available for businesses of all sizes, industry and targeted demographics. Up to 92% of marketers are using social media marketing and claimed that it helped their business in 2014 in various ways including significant increases in website traffic.
Now, more than 97% of these marketers use social media but only 15% are sure that they are using the right social media management tools. Business owners should make it a point to learn more about the various social media tools available to them before they invest their time and resources, and implement these tools within their own marketing campaigns – and you can start with these three great tools presented here.
Oktopost
If you need a cost-effective social media marketing tool that will help you manage and track the publication of messages, help you engage with prospects efficiently and generate the leads your business needs, then you can go for Oktopost. It’s packed with a lot of features: from tracking clicks to sales conversions right down to individual posts, allowing you to get real insights of your true social media ROI. Streamlined for B2B social media, Oktopost will work best in generating the most traffic and conversions from your LinkedIn marketing campaigns.
Features:
- Manages the posting of messages to multiple profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ Pages and Twitter, allowing you to schedule future post right down to minute level
- The Autoposter feature that allows you to schedule and control your whole social media marketing campaign with the click of your mouse or a tap on your screen
- Posts and messages that contain links can be automatically tracked
- Conversions that occur on your website or landing pages can be tracked down to the original post or tweet that generated the inbound click that brought visitors to the page
- You can easily respond to comments and re-tweets directly from Oktopost through the Social Inbox feature
The Pros:
- Better Message Management – Oktopost allows users to create a library or repository of messages, including pre-approved posts and tweets that you can use for scheduled future postings through the Autoposting feature
- Integrate all social communications through the Social Inbox – Through Oktopost’s Social Inbox, you can view, keep track, respond and manage all your communications from within the social media management tool itself
- Track Individual Campaigns through Analytics – You can track the performance of individual campaigns directly from Oktopost’s tracking dashboard, or you can integrate external applications like Google Analytics and gain detailed insights about the performance of your posts, clicks and conversions across all your social networks
The Cons:
Oktopost users feedbacked very little negative comments about this social media management tool, except for minor suggestions like more powerful browser extensions, grabbing of images directly from the source page when inputting a URL, and the ability to cross post between networks.
Pricing Schemes:
Oktopost offers a free trial without any credit card required, after which you can avail of paid subscriptions ranging from:
- Starter – $ 49/mo
- Marketer – $ 119/mo
- Business – $ 249/mo
- Enterprise – need to discuss with them
What It’s Best For:
Although applicable to other social networks, Oktopost is targeted more towards maximizing social media marketing impact on LinkedIn, particularly on LinkedIn Groups which are some of the most under-utilized marketing channels in social media.
Hootsuite
If your social media marketing team needs more collaborative functionalities for executing your brand’s social campaigns across various networks that include Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn from a single online dashboard, then Hootsuite would be the best social relationship platform for your business.
Features:
- Manage multiple profiles and pages on Google+, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Twitter, and WordPress from a single web-based dashboard
- Scheduler with calendar updater and spreadsheet uploader
- Team collaboration where you can track, mark and delegate messages, tweets and replies
- Mobile app support for Android and iOS
- Scheduled reporting with customized analytics
- Ability to post updates through RSS integration
The Pros:
- All your company departments can collaborate with one another and manage their social network profiles and pages, engage with targeted audiences and customers, and most importantly generate revenue using any devices available within a secured and easy-to-use environment
- Business units can easily coordinate with one another in posting and promoting messaging through Hootsuite’s scaleable content management features
- Business owners and their social media marketing executives can gain valuable insights from comprehensive social data and analytics that will help you make critical business decisions and corresponding actions
The Cons:
Some Hootsuite users reported a few items where the application could further improve the performance of this social media management tool:
- The free version of Hootsuite allows for 2 free reports that you can use, after which you need to pay for reports, using points that you earn through an equivalent dollar value
- URL shorteners are important in social media marketing but in Hootsuite, you are limited to only ow.ly and ht.ly. You can however use custom URL shorteners of your choice which you pay for per month or per year
- Other users encountered image problems when posting or sharing links to their Facebook pages when they use RSS feeds or the bulk scheduler. Aside from that, other issues include no analytical data in Facebook Insights when posting new content through Hootsuite
Pricing Schemes:
Hootsuite offers a free version as well as a pro version which you can avail for $ 8.99 per month. Enterprise versions are also available that caters specifically to the needs of professionals and businesses of all sizes.
What It’s Best For:
Hootsuite is very popular for use with various social networks, but is more popular as an ideal web-based Twitter client for its basic design for use with team collaborations, allowing individual team members to work directly on customer messages, replies, re-tweets, updates and mentions.
Swayy
If your social media management needs require you to have a steady stream of shareable content for your focused social networks, based on available options for your themes, subjects, schedules and other analytics options, then Swayy might be the perfect tool for your business. It can help you find great and engaging content that you can share with targeted audiences based on what is relevant to them and what is interesting to them.
Features:
Swayy can easily be integrated with Facebook and Twitter, two of the most popular social media networks, allowing you to enjoy its many features which include:
- Daily newsfeed that send you a list of news based on your targeted audiences’ interests
- Stories fed to your dashboard are presented in Masonry style card layout that makes it easier to navigate
- Stories are showcased based on two categories:
- “Currently Trending in Your Circles” – content that is popular among broader subject categories that does not necessarily include, in greater detail, your targeted audience categories
- “Based on Your Community” – categorized more accurately according to the subjects or topics your brand and targeted audiences are associated with
- Suggested mentions and hashtags
- Option to schedule tweets to a later time period
The Pros:
You can use the features of Swayy to your advantage just like the following:
- Easily scroll and look at the stories through the visual design of the Daily Newsfeed allowing to select or exclude a particular content, giving you the option to choose and schedule your posts
- You can easily select and pick the right content that would be relevant and interesting to your targeted audiences through a recommended list of topics. Paid versions would also allow you to specify the topics according to what is interesting to targeted audiences
- You can immediately share your choice of content through the “share” function, or you can do so at a preferred later time through the “share later” function, allowing you to plan what you can post on subsequent days
- Swayy also provides customizable options for analytics so you can track the likes, shares, types of content, and other social signals that are popular with your targeted audiences
The Cons:
Still relatively new compared to other services, Swayy is still focused only on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and is not able to connect yet with Google+ accounts.
Pricing Schemes:
Swayy offers a free plan for a single Advanced Content Dashboard. If you need more dashboards or bring in a team, you can avail of the Pro plan at $ 9.00 per month, the Business plan for $ 49.00 a month, or the Agencies plan for $ 119.00 a month.
What It’s Best For:
Swayy is great for helping you curate and generate better and more targeted content that your audiences want, thus increasing engagement and interaction that will boost your social media marketing efforts.
By getting a deeper insight into the workings of social media management tools, you can learn more about how these tools can help you deal with the chaotic social media jungle that your business may be in. But before you jump right in, it is vital that you first take a closer look at these three great social media management tools and learn how you can harness these tools, sync with and monitor all your active social media accounts, and make them all work for you for the good of your business.
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