01 March 2017

Social media marketing is defined as the process of using social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn for gaining website traffic and the attention of your target audience. For marketers, community managers, advertisers and sales professionals, social media is a unique and powerful tool because it helps them in connecting with and appealing to their customers. Therefore, not having a strong social media marketing strategy can be a major disadvantage for your business because you are losing out on reaching your customers and letting your competitors horn in.

The problem is that some businesses are using social media marketing, but they are still not getting the results this desire. This is because they are unable to figure out where they are doing well and what they are doing wrong. They are still tracking their likes, tweets, comments, followers and favorites in the old-fashioned way. Are you also making this mistake? In 2016, it is time to say goodbye to the clunky and outdated dashboards and give up the concept of manual social media management. As far as social media management is concerned, there are some easy and simple account management tools such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite, but it doesn’t stop there.

Apart from these big names, there are some other social media marketing tools that are often overlooked, but should definitely be a part of your arsenal in this year. Here are the top 5:

1. Cyfe; the ultimate all-in-one dashboard

This particular dashboard enables you to virtually monitor literally every single piece of analytic data about your business. It has widgets built-in, which are aimed at pulling data from popular services like Salesforce and Google. You also have the freedom of adding your Push API or custom widgets for incorporating integration data. In simple terms, all the data you may or may not need can be found in one place. You can use Cyfe for tracking your Twitter followers, Facebook demographics and brand mentions from the social media dashboard.

The startup board found on this tool can be used for tracking the app subscriptions, downloads, new sign-ups and other KPI’s and all in real time. The client dashboard also allows you to automate client reporting with social media, SEO and advertising data. Furthermore, you can also find a web analytics dashboard, project management dashboard, sales dashboard and IT board.

2. Social Rank; connecting with your best followers

The easiest and simplest way for you to organize, identify and manage your followers on Instagram and Twitter is with the use of Social Rank. The tool helps you in sorting your followers based on different criteria such as Most Valuable, which are the highest profile followers, Most Followed, Most Engaged, which involves the frequency of mentions, replies and retweets and Best Followers i.e. those who have engaged with you most recently. You can also incorporate additional fillers for finding followers based on geographic locations, bio keywords, activity and interest. You are also free to make custom lists that can be used for engagement campaigns as this allows you to know the top followers of your competitors.

3. Curalate; unlocking the power of pictures

There are about 2.6 billion pictures shared on social media on a daily basis and Instagram has become the de facto social platform for the savvy Millennials, which means that a business cannot deny the power held by visual content. Curalate is great for kick-starting your visual brand management. Image recognition algorithms are used by this tool on the social media conversations and then it scours various social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest to know what people are saying about your brand in images.

With the use of Curalate, you are able to instantly know what your audience is visually sharing about your business and brand. You can also moderate and collect fan photos for user generated content. You can also schedule your own pictures for posting on Instagram and Pinterest or create a fully customizable image gallery.

4. Quuu; for building a curated content stream

One of the necessary yet time consuming evils for brands is content curation. The problem with user-generated content is that it can be a miss or a hit and you don’t wish to be occupied with pumping out a persistent content stream. The ideal solution is available in the form of Quuu as this tool provides you with hand-curated content essentials and solutions so you can easily put your content marketing on auto-pilot.

You should begin by choosing relevant categories that make a difference to your audience and are important for your brand. The next step is to send the hand-curated content to your Buffer.com account directly. Posts can be manually curated and scheduled via Buffer. When you are using Quuu, it will only take you a couple of minutes to set up and then it continues to run automatically, which saves you a whole lot of sanity and valuable time.

5. Babbly; supercharging your viral linking strategy

When you want your content to go viral on the internet, there is a social media sharing tool available in the form of Babbly. Do you want to share a link that’s powerful and wonderful? You can just post it to the Babbly community and this will simply go viral. You have to opt for a post category, decide the number of shares you want your URL to get, provide a simple description for the post and then just simply sit back and watch as your URL reaches a diverse and huge audience due to Babbly’s network. The greater links you share, the more sharing love they will get.

These days, social media marketing and management tools are a dime a dozen and some are annoying enough that you choose to forget about them fairly quickly. However, the right social media marketing tools such as the ones listed above can make it easy for you to reach your target market and capitalize on it in the best possible way.

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