Top 5 Social Media Tools to Boost Your Social Marketing Campaigns
It is an unarguable fact that social media is ruling the advertising market in recent times. This hype is because social media campaigns are affordable and provide thousands of potential customers in quick time. There are several social networking sites and Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest are leading the race. While you start a campaign on social networks, effectively managing it is not easy for small businesses. Social media tools automate this process and provide better engagement across various sites. Here are 5 best tools to help you in this regard.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a powerful tool to manage your social media campaigns. It supports major networking sites like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, WordPress etc. you can schedule your tweets or messages according to your requirements. You can integrate Facebook insights and other social media apps easily. The free version supports one account and five social profiles. Hootsuite Pro comes at $10 per month and allows you to add two user accounts and unlimited social profiles. This program is suitable for small and micro businesses. While you can manage your profiles from a single dashboard, the visual appearance is not appealing compared to other programs.
Postling
Postling is another good tool to manage multiple social channels and platforms from a single dashboard. It supports major social networking sites in addition to monitoring data from review sites. You can post images, videos, text and blog posts to all social sites and schedule them as well. Postling is $1 for a 30-day trial. The upgraded version requires $5 and support up to 5 social profiles. You can add more accounts by paying $3 for each account. It allows you to track and monitor keywords. iPhone app is available. Postling is perfect for businesses that are tight on budget.
SocialSprout
SocialSprout is a powerful tool that brings your messages across all social platforms into a single inbox. It supports Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You can efficiently respond, follow or retweet using this tool. iPhone and Android apps are available. You can take advantage of the Discovery feature that tells you whom to follow based on their activity levels. SocialSprout provides powerful analytics that can be exported to excel or PDF. This program comes with a 30-day free trial. After that, you need to pay $39 per month for one account and 10 social profiles. The price increases as you add user accounts and social profiles.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck, as the name suggests, is a perfect tool to effectively manage your twitter accounts. Considering its popularity, Twitter has now purchased this application and offers it for free. While you manage Twitter accounts, you can integrate other social profiles as well. The interface is good. Using a single dashboard, you can check keyword searches, followers and other activities happening on the site. It shows messages from multiple accounts side by side. The new version requires more clicks to perform certain tasks.
CrowdBooster
CrowdBooster is a social media analytical tool that tells you about behavioral trends of your audience. You can check what posts are popular, how your audience is reacting, what the best time to post is and whom to interact with. By analyzing your social media campaigns, you can improve conversion rates. The interface is intuitive. This program provides analytics in graphs, charts and visually appealing formats to help you understand them easily. You can schedule posts. The program sends weekly summary of the campaign performance. However, analytics are not updated on real-time and does not offer keyword monitoring. It only supports Twitter and Facebook. CrowdBooster is free for one twitter account and one Facebook fanpage. It charges $39 for 10 accounts and $99 for 30 accounts. Small businesses can take advantage of this program.
