Social Media Marketing Tools: 5 Popular Tools Reviewed

Guest Post by Software Advice Market Analyst – Ashley Furness

Recent reports reveal a troubling disconnect between what customers expect when they express concerns on social media and how companies actually respond. While 62 percent of consumers use Twitter, Facebook and other channels to broadcast service complaints, a vast majority of those messages never receive a response.

For very large businesses, the problem is simply one of volume: it’s impossible to respond to the thousands of brand mentions daily. But this can also be a challenge for small businesses in that they don’t have the manpower to effectively monitor and respond to social media. How many small businesses have a dedicated social media manager, after all?

Thankfully, developers have come out with all sorts of tools for helping small businesses monitor and address social media service issues in real time. Here’s 5 tools that will help you power up your small business social response.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite combines social media monitoring with analytics and report. Small businesses can upload all of their social accounts–including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and more–into one dashboard. Newsfeeds are organized in columns so the user can monitor all streams at the same time.

Reporting is also easily customizable. Users can go extremely granular and drill down to fan base demographics and conversion rates, or simply watch shares, likes and fans. These reports can then be easily exported, saved and shared.

Crowdbooster
This platform analyzes mentions on your Facebook and Twitter accounts and makes suggestions for post timing, people you should interact with and topics your followers would be attracted to. This information is easily digestible in a color-coded dashboard.

Also, the tool sends weekly emails that summarize progress. Users can evaluate the performance of individual tweets and posts by date and social media channel.

SproutSocial
SproutSocial aggregates all of your social media feeds into one monitoring dashboard. Small businesses can also pre-schedule posts and send them across all social channels at once. Users can also track keywords across articles, blogs and news sites.

The platform also offers a “Discover” feature, which suggests people to follow based on target customer criteria. Users can monitor competitors’ social activity and analyze customers’ interests.

Buffer
Buffer offers all of the social media management staples–unified account stream, scheduled posts and a mobile application.

Additionally, Buffer integrates with myriad reader applications such as Google Reader and Kippt. Reporting tools offer analytics on likes, shares and retweets at a glance.

Postling
This tool is similar to SproutSocial in functionality, but adds listening and monitoring information from Yelp, CitySearch and TripAdvisor. Users can also track keywords such as business name or industry across all social channels.

They receive an alert to their inbox whenever these words are published on social media, blogs and news sites.

What social media management tools do you use? What do you like about it? Let us know by commenting below.

AUTHOR BIO:
Ashley Furness is a technology and marketing analyst for Software Advice. She has spent the last six years reporting and writing business news and strategy features. Her work has appeared in myriad publications including Inc., Upstart Business Journal, the Austin Business Journal and the North Bay Business Journal. Before joining Software Advice in 2012, she worked in sales management and ad-vertising. Currently, her research focuses on various topics related to social media, CRM software, sales, customer service and marketing strategy.