With the plethora of social media tools out there, and more popping up each day, it can be difficult to determine which ones are right for your local business. Ultimately, though, selecting a few key resources can make your marketing efforts on social media platforms much more efficient and effective. Of the five tools that I would suggest are must haves for your business, two provide a more general monitoring of your social media impact while the other three are specific to a particular platform.
TwentyFeet
The amount of information about usage and followers generated for each social media platform can be overwhelming for a local business. That's why this tool is so helpful. It can aggregate and report out on eight different social media platforms. Therefore, it can be helpful in conducting a regular audit of overall social media performance of your organization.
Topsy
Being aware of what is being shared about your local business is vital. However, just doing an internet search for your business name wont give you all the information for which you're looking. You need a resource which will review the social media platforms and the internet. This is where this tool can assist you. The important aspect with which to get proficient when it comes to this tool is your search terms; it will likely take some time and research to refine what terms and keywords will return the most accurate results for your local business.
Hootsuite
For posting to Twitter (and some other social media networks), Hootsuite is a great tool. It allows your local business to shorten links while creating a tweet, schedule future tweets, and design an easy to view dashboard. It is one of the fastest ways to assess your Twitter impact and activity. For as wonderful as Hootsuite is for Twitter, its not suggested for Facebook as the Facebook algorithm doesn't look kindly on scheduling posts outside of Facebook. Depending on the other platforms your local business utilizes, you may be able to also monitor and schedule them in this tool.
TweetReach
If there are no re-tweets or comments, it can be hard to determine if a particular tweet had an impact on your followers (or even those searching for your local business). This is where TweetReach comes in. This tool can be utilized to determine the reach of your tweets; who's read them and how has action been taken. Now your business can understand the full impact of its activities.
Facebook Insights
When it comes to Facebook, often the best tools for use with this platform come from Facebook itself, and analytical data on usage and trends is no different. For a local business, it is often getting used to regularly reviewing and monitoring trends to determine how to change or enhance posts to maximize reader engagement.
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HootSuite takes the cake for me, hands down – the best social media management suite out there. The only downside to HootSuite is that it doesnt come with a desktop application, and you have to go to the website to access your dashboard. But that’s where Tweetdeck comes in, it has a great little desktop app that is really easy to use, and also allows for Tweet/update scheduling.
Hi Chris,
great review of these tweeting decks, will using these help my seo in any way as they wont just be links from Twitter but also from these helper sites?
Thanks, looking forward to your advice.
Zevi
I am using Hootsuite a couple months now and i am very pleased about the program. After reading your article I have deepen myself in Topsy and dowloaded the trial on their website. Thanks for this informative article!!
Greets Bram
I have triedal five platforms and i think Hootsuite is the best one. It makes it so easy to switch between profiles and it is so easy to manage all kind of messages. Only thing i dont like is that i can’t download the program just like Tweetdeck
Another Hootsuite evangelist here. Excellent tool.
Why do you prefer it to be a downloadble program over something that runs in the browser?
Hi Ruud,
I prefer a downloadable program because i work with a lot of tabs in my browser. Sometimes it´s a real tab mania. It´s takes me some time to find the right tab thats why i prefer a download version of Hootsuite.
Samen here Hans.
But the downloadable programs does not always work as good as a program that runs in the browser and they carry a virus sometimes when you pick out the wrong link.
I have been using HootSuite from the beginning. I own around 12 diffirent social media platforms in twelve diffirent niches.
Hootsuite meats my needs. It’s so such an easy program to manage your social media with. SO if you get a lot of income trhough social media channels, i deffitnly recommend to use the HootSuite Pro Program!