Five social media tools all the pros are using

Maintaining an effective social media presence for e-business marketing can be made much easier by using a number of analytic and social media management tools. Here we look at a five tools used by those at the top of the social media game.

Mention

Mention provides a clean and user-friendly way to keep track of ‘mentions’ of specific content across a range of social media platforms. You can set up alerts for when your business, industry, competitors or any chosen topic is being discussed.

Mention can help you better understand what your potential customers are seeking, as well as alert you to discussions and debates that are going on so you contribute in a timely fashion.

Tagboard

Similar to Mention, Tagboard allows you to monitor keywords (hashtags) across a number of different social media platforms.

Compfight

If you blog, including images can be a key way of attracting attention to your posts, especially when these are shared on social media. However, few small to medium-sized businesses have the budget to pay for quality imagery.

Compfight provides a quick Tumblr search for free Creative Commons licensed images based on keywords. It will also output the appropriate HTML code so you can provide photographers with proper attribution.

Socialbakers

Socialbakers is a powerful analytics tool that allows you to measure your performance on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube against those of your competitors.

Manually quantifying and understanding the extent of your own and your competitors’ tweets, updates and videos, and customer engagement with these, can be laborious and time consuming. Socialbakers makes it easy to consume this data at a glance using easy-to-read charts and graphs.

SocialOomph

If you tweet as part of your social media strategy, doing so at the most suitable times can be a challenge. Rather than needing to fit meetings and important day-to-day activities around your online marketing needs, SocialOomph allows you to schedule up to 500 unique tweets in advance, and then release them at times of your choosing.

The program also has mention, keyword and retweet tracking functionality. The paid-for premium version allows you to schedule posts and updates for a number of other platforms, including Facebook and LinkedIn.

And remember if you have a Bloomtools website, your Blogs and Articles can feed into your Facebook, and Twitter accounts for you - pushing out valuable teasers to those media to encourage more traffic back to your website.

These are just a few of the countless social media tools available to you. Harness their power and see your online presence grow.