Five Must Have Social Tools For An Easy Online Life
Managing multiple social media channels is a time consuming and a labour intensive task. Not only do you need to manage the log-in details so that you can post to each account, you need to track responses, collect engagement data and schedule messages. Fortunately for those of us who have "social media manager" as part of our job description, there are many tools out there to make life easier.
This article was written on behalf of the Twist Forum. Twist is an affiliate forum offering advice on social media and more!
1. Hootsuite.com
Cost: Free for Basic Accounts. Subscription fees vary. Hootsuite is the gold-standard when it comes to managing multiple social media profiles. The tool supports Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Google+. Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube and Flickr as well as RSS feeds. Free users can manage up to five social profiles, and take advantage of some basic analytics features. Subscribers can manage an unlimited number of profiles, and, depending on the plan they subscribe to, give one or more additional users access to their accounts. This is a handy feature for people with large social media teams, because it means that you can give employees HootSuite privileges instead of giving them the passwords to your real social media account.2. Bufferapp.com
Cost: Free for Basic Accounts. $10/month for Subscription for Extra Features Buffer is a handy tool for scheduling posts for Twitter social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Free users are limited to one account per social network. Subscribers can manage up to twelve accounts, spread across the networks that Buffer supports. Use Buffer to schedule social media messages for various times of the day, ensuring that your latest posts or updates get noticed by as many people as possible.3. Klout.com
Cost: Free Klout is a free tool which tracks the level of influence of your social media accounts. This website gives you a "Klout Score". Higher scores are better. A relatively new, almost dormant account scores 10, a fairly active account which has some followers that engage with the account regularly scores 40. If you are scoring 60+ on any of your accounts then you can congratulate yourself on having a respectable, influential account.4. RockMelt Mobile
Cost: Free The original RockMelt App was a desktop browser designed to make managing social media accounts as easy as possible. Sadly, this app didn't take off because people are too attached to their existing Web browsers. RockMelt was reborn as a browser based app and a mobile app which allows you to discover the latest social media trends, and share them with just a few taps on your smartphone's screen. Remember that your followers expect to see you sharing and engaging with other people's content, so it's vital that you stay up-to-date with the latest social media trends.5. SocialMention.com
Cost: Free SocialMention is a free tool which provides real-time social media analytics. Think of this service as being Google Alerts, but for social networks instead of the wider web. SocialMention offers free daily email alerts for the keywords that you choose to monitor, as well as a real time "buzz" widget which you can embed into your blog. The most interesting part of the SocialMention site is the search feature, which shows sentiment information, reach, author counts, related keywords and other handy metrics. If you want to know what people really think of your brand, this is a good place to start looking.This article was written on behalf of the Twist Forum. Twist is an affiliate forum offering advice on social media and more!
