How Can You Improve Your Company's Social Media Presence? These 4 Tools Can Help
The results are clear; social media is an essential marketing tool for businesses. You have created a Facebook and/or Twitter page for your company, but how do you know if they are effective? What time of day should you post? Who is your audience? How do you keep track of mentions? Are people engaging with your content?
Social media tools can help you answer these questions, and they can make overseeing your social accounts much more manageable. There are tons of social media tools out there, so it’s important to try out different ones and find those that best serve your needs. Here are four tools that offer many of their features for free. As with most services, more advanced features have a subscription fee.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is extremely popular in the social media world, and it’s for good reason. Hootsuite is a social media management tool, meaning it allows you to manage your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and other social media platforms all in one place. You can schedule posts in advance to be sent out automatically, monitor online conversation, easily respond to mentions, and access basic analytics data for your accounts.
2. Followerwonk
Follower is a great tool for finding information about your Twitter followers. Followerwonk can tell you things like where your followers are across the globe, what time of day they are most active (a hint for when you should schedule your posts), and what words are most common in the Twitter bios of your followers.
Followerwonk is also helpful for expanding your audience. For instance, if your company is trying to target an audience similar to that of Airbnb, you can compare your followers with Airbnb’s, see if there is any overlap, and then more closely examine the followers of Airbnb to find new influencers.
3. Topsy
Topsy is a helpful search tool. Type in a link to an article you posted on your website and you can see all tweets that mention the article, as well as if anyone influential linked to it. You can also do this for any keyword, which is helpful in monitoring the Twitter conversation about a topic, finding photos or videos on the topic, and finding influencers on the topic. You can also track mentions of keywords over time and find the most influential posts using the keyword.
Lastly, don’t forget that Facebook and Twitter offer some free analytics insights of their own. If you’re not ready to start using a specific management or analytics tool, but still want insight into your social media performance, this is the way to go.
The analytics section of Twitter can show you things like how many impressions your tweet got, your tweets that got the most engagement, and how many link clicks you earn on an average day.
If you are the admin of a Facebook page, Facebook can tell you things like the number of people your post reached, the number of people who clicked your post, the number of likes your page gained over time, as well as some demographic information about the people that viewed your page.