The Top Social Media Tools for Working Smarter, Not Harder Stop relying on manual labor and take a deep dive into social-media time saving tools.
By Cynthia Johnson Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Many businesses are struggling with social media, because it takes up so much time. This is understandable considering that most businesses not only have their digital marketing to manage, but also have to keep up with all other aspects of their business.
We need to stop wasting time on social media and use tools that can help us get it done more quickly. In today's world, we can rely on a slew of social-media marketing tools and analytics to help us save time and money without having to sacrifice the work.
Here is a list of tools that will ease your social-media workload and allow you to focus on your operating your business.
Socedo
Many people use social media to find qualified leads, but most businesses just don't have the time and resources to do this manually. Socedo uses technology to automate lead identification and engagement, delivering comprehensive report and sales funnel optimization. Social media is noisy, but this tool is very helpful in cutting through this noise and ensuring you attain your business goals.
Related: 3 Steps to Maximize Your Mobile Email Marketing
SecureMySocial
Every business should have a social-media policy. Social-media policies are designed to keep companies and employees safe from legal and regulatory actions, employment termination, and reputation-management issues. We hear about employees being let go all the time over things posted to social media that violate a company's policy.
SecureMySocial, a new offering created by cybersecurity veteran, Joseph Steinberg, alerts people in real time if they make social-media posts that may break the law, violate internal-policy guidelines, deface their employer's brand, or might otherwise harm either the person making the post or their employer. Within seconds of a problematic post being made from anywhere, SecureMySocial can notify the poster with information as to why the post may be problematic and instructions on how to remove the post, or it can even automatically and instantly delete the post if so authorized. This is a potential lifesaver.
Oktopost
Oktopost is a social-media content distribution and management tool. The difference with this tool and others like it is that Oktopost is focused on B2B. Most social-media management tools are focused on B2C, and anyone who works in B2B knows that the two are very different. B2B marketing is an entirely different language, especially in social media and this tool will you determine the actual ROI of your social media campaigns and interactions.
Related: How Entrepreneurs Can Leverage Local News
Cyfe
This is one of my favorite analytics tools. Cyfe reports detailed social-media analytics, SEO, AdWords, Google Analytics and brand mentions at a very affordable rate for small businesses. Instead of keeping all of your data in multiple places, you can customize multiple dashboards within Cyfe and compare the date all in one place. We use this for everything, including competitor research, industry research and advertising.
Nuvi
Nuvi is a great way to deep dive into social-media conversations. Nuvi has partnered with DataSift (Human Data Intelligence tool), and DataSift was one of the first partners to access Facebook's firehose. This means that Nuvi has access to Facebook's firehose as well! What does this mean? It means that Nuvi can access and deliver analytics to their users on private and public Facebook posts. The tool will not show you specific user posts or data, but it will give you the analytical data for a topic based on public and private content. Having access to this information makes using Nuvi a must for content marketing and businesses who want insight into what people are privately sayings about their brand or industry.
BuzzSumo
Convenience is everything for a business that is monitoring multiple sites at once. Using BuzzSumo allows you to monitor everything at once. This dashboard allows you to keep track of data like most shared, top authors, content analysis, and items that are trending, allowing you to filter back up as far as one-year. Compare the data from then to now and see the difference. Manage content alerts (in real-time) and know what is working for your company on different social platforms and see how people are reacting to them. You can also use BuzzSumo to trace content back to the original person or people that influenced it. The ability to track influencers is extremely important in social media and BuzzSumo does just that.
Remember, not all of these tools will work for every business, but at least one of them would. Take a look, request a demo and try them for yourself. If it saves us time, it will also save us money. Stop relying on manual labor and take a deep dive into social media time saving tools.
Related: 4 Habits of a Super-Connector
