Today, as I was wrapping up my 2-day mobile marketing workshop in Cairo, Egypt, one of the attendees asked me about the best tools to manage and monitor your social media campaigns.
Of course, most of us are familiar with Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, which are the dominant social media management tools. But what about the others? Are there better, more robust tools? And, of those, what are the differentiating features of each?
With that in mind, I adapted some content from a post I originally wrote for Social Media Examiner that highlights the 5 best (in my opinion) social media management tools available to you.
Before you read about each tool, keep in mind that the first step in selecting a social media management tool is to figure out what you’re looking for. Are you looking for a streamlined approach that allows you to get in, get out and get back to work? Or are you looking for a more robust tool that can provide you data, analytics and insights?
If you’re looking for the second option — a more robust tool — then review the choices below. These are several of the best options I came across when I researched a wide variety of the tools widely available to the general population.
Ready? Here goes:
Sprout Social Helps You Engage Followers and Respond in Real Time. One of the best things about Sprout Social is the user interface. Many people (myself included) find it easier to process and digest data when it’s presented graphically. That’s one of the strengths of this tool – you can quickly check data and figure out how to respond to it.
Another important aspect of Sprout Social is the Smart Inbox. It’s designed to help you respond quickly and easily from different social media accounts (e.g., Twitter or Facebook), different message types (e.g., Mentions, Direct Messages, Wall Posts, etc.) or even different brand keywords (e.g., Social Media Examiner, 60 Second Marketer, Razor Social, etc.).
There are a wide variety of ways you can use Sprout Social to manage your campaigns, but one of my favorites is the Twitter Comparison Tool. It’s a great way to compare your Twitter usage to friend’s and competitor’s. As you can see below, my friend (and fellow Social Media Examiner contributor) Ian Cleary does a better job at engaging his followers than I do. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t used Sprout Social to collect that data.
Sprout Social is ideally suited for people who like to digest and process information visually. It can be used by individuals or by teams and has very solid reporting and analytics. The cost is reasonable and their free 30-day trial is perfect for people who are interested in taking it out for a spin.
MarketMeSuite Provides Easy-to-Use Dashboard that Works Like Email. If there’s one thing everyone reading this article has in common, it’s that we’re all comfortable using email. A message comes in, you open it, then you respond.
That’s the approach MarketMeSuite uses for their social media management tool. Their dashboard is designed to work the same way your email inbox works. You can look at messages in the preview pane, then open them up to explore more about the person who sent you the message.
If you’re like many people, you’re very busy trying to run the day-to-day operations of your business, so sitting down and learning a new tool by trial and error is time-consuming. One of the strengths of MarketMeSuite is that they have a built-in tutorial to walk you through the basics of using the platform. The tutorial guides you through a simple 9-step process to help you get up-and-running fast. Best of all, it takes the guesswork out of trying to figure out all the bells and whistles — just complete the tutorial and you’ll have a great foundation to work from.
MarketMeSuite has plenty of other strengths, too. Their geo-targeting feature allows you to locate customers using social media who are near your business. It allows you to manage and market on multiple social media profiles. And you can schedule messages across social networks with just one click.
You might be interested in taking advantage of MarketMeSuite’s free service as you make up your mind about which of their fee-based programs most suit your needs.
Sendible Provides Brand Monitoring and Sentiment Analysis for Businesses. Here’s a question – if you found out that 70% of your customers described your product as “cheap” while only 30% described it as “a good value,” would that be important to your business? Absolutely. And that explains one of the strengths of the Sendible platform.
With their 360° Brand Monitoring and Sentiment Analysis feature, you’re able to read and respond to what people are saying about your brand across the web. Plus, if you want to be really pro-active, you can monitor what people are saying about your competitor’s products, too. That way, when someone posts an update about a negative experience with a competitor, you can gently (and politely) introduce them to your brand. (Note: Be cautious with that tactic since, if you’re too aggressive, it can backfire.)
Like other social media management platforms, Sendible provides a wide variety of features at an affordable price. You can engage with new and existing customers across multiple platforms, analyze and track your social media and email campaigns, measure the success of the content you share and a multitude of other things.
Sendible is terrific if you’re a data junkie – there’s a lot of information to plow through with their platform. The user interface isn’t as elegant as some of the other options mentioned here, so if look-and-feel is important to you, it might not be perfect. But if you’re more focused on content, then Sendible has plenty of data that can be put to use for your business.
Socialbakers Provides Large Amounts of Data in a Friendly User Interface. If you want to combine the data available in Sendible with the user interface available with Sprout Social and MarketMeSuite, then you might want to check out Socialbakers. It’s the most expensive of the tools reviewed here, but it may be worth the price. (Side note: It’s not like it’s really expensive, it’s just the most expensive of the batch here. If you want really expensive, check out Wildfire, which targets big brands with deep pockets.)
Socialbakers tracks fan growth across multiple platforms so you can determine which content was most well-received by your audience. It also allows you to analyze fan growth by days of the week and times of the day. That way, you can track when your audience is most likely to respond to your content.
If you’re interested in tracking how your social media campaigns are performing vs. your competitor’s, you’ll like some of the tools available with Socialbakers. You can compare how you stack up on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and see all of your competitor’s pages, profiles and channels in an easy-to-understand dashboard. Best of all, you can analyze the content that prospective customers find most engaging, which leads to better content from you.
In addition to the features mentioned above, Socialbakers has a number of terrific reports available on their website. The reports include relevant statistics about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn. They even break some of the data out by country, making it perfect for the international crowd.
Crowdbooster Does Much of the Thinking for You. If you’re like many people, you’re busy running your business, so the idea of drilling down into vast amounts of data and analyzing what to do with it is a bit daunting. Enter Crowdbooster, a social media management tool for people who want their tools to make recommendations for them.
With Crowdbooster, you can check the number of retweets, replies, impressions, likes, comments by date range or in real time. You can also drill down to see who retweeted you, how many shares were organic and how effective your campaigns have been.
One of the strengths of Crowdbooster is that it provides email alerts that are dropped into your inbox each day. The alerts give you a summary of the data that Crowdbooster collected and, best of all, provides recommendations on how you should respond. That way, for example, when someone with a high Klout score follows you, Crowdbooster will recommend that you follow them back and engage with them.
About the only weakness with Crowdbooster is the fact that they currently only support Twitter and Facebook, so if YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ or any of the other social media platforms are an important part of your mix, Crowdbooster may not be for you. But if you like the idea of having a tool that not only provides data but also provides recommendations, then you’ll want to check it out.
Which Social Media Management Tool is Right for You? After an extensive search, I’ve found the tools listed above to have a lot of great qualities to them. There are still others out there that you may want to investigate. These include SproutLoud, SocialBro, MediaFunnel and others. No matter which approach you take, if you’re ready to take the next step up to a more robust platform, you can’t go wrong with the tools mentioned here.
Jamie Turner is the CEO of the 60 Second Marketer and 60 Second Communications, a marketing communications agency that works with national and international brands. He is the co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile” and is a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.