Six useful tools to make your social media marketing more efficient
Social media is fast paced and it can be a challenge keeping each of your accounts updated with interesting content. We’ve put together a roundup of some of the best management and monitoring tools to help you update your social media channels more efficiently. 
Hootsuite is a great platform for monitoring social media and best of all, you can use it for free! The dashboard is set up in streams that appear as lists, allowing you to track conversations and respond to customers and clients efficiently. You can specify search phrases to create streams that identify who is talking about your company even if they don’t directly mention your Twitter handle, and this is also useful for finding out what people in your industry are talking about in real time. Hootsuite works across multiple social media channels, so you can do everything in one place rather than logging into each account separately and this also includes scheduling future posts.
Pluggio is a simple website that offers Twitter scheduling for multiple accounts. You can schedule up to ten tweets for each account at a time and re-scheduling is easy to manage. Pluggio also has a ‘Dripfeed’ which posts your tweets at regular or random intervals so that your social media is still being updated with new content every day. This is ideal for businesses who don’t have time to tweet regularly but still want to promote their services and maintain an active presence on social media.
Manage Flitter is ideal if you are looking to grow your Twitter following and ensure that you’re only following active users. It offers a comprehensive breakdown of the people you’re following based on whether they’re following you back and also allows you to rank accounts based on their influence, so you can see the most influential accounts to interact with. Spam accounts are common on Twitter but Manage Flitter can identify if you’re following any of these, making it much quicker to unfollow them instead of scrolling through a long list of accounts.
Buffer is one of the best tools for scheduling social media posts thanks to its clean and simple layout. When you add a link into a new post it automatically generates a picture to include which makes scheduling so much faster. Research suggests that posts with photos get five times more engagement than text, so it is an ideal platform to use for sharing highly effective content. Buffer is also one of the only platforms to offer Linkedin scheduling, which is ideal for B2B companies who want to use social media for promotion. It follows a simple format that also allows you to “re-buffer” so you can share posts multiple times across a range of social media channels while keeping your updates regular and consistent.
So you’ve posted lots of updates and got a few likes and retweets, but which posts are the most successful? Many social media channels now have built in analysis tools, so you can clearly identify the posts that have driven new traffic to your website or increased your following which are key success factors in any social media campaign.
Twitter Analytics is a useful way of identifying which of your Tweets have been the most popular, so that you can share the best content possible. You can measure your success based on impressions and engagement, meaning that it isn’t just retweets and likes that are important in influencing your audience. If you have a specific audience you are targeting, Twitter Analytics can provide a breakdown of the demographics of your followers so you can see where they’re from and what their interests are. This makes it easier to tailor your tweets so that they interest your followers and will help to increase engagement. Another interesting element to consider is the number of link clicks you receive. Many businesses use Twitter to direct traffic to their website, so a high click through rate could see potential sales increase depending on the nature of your business. We often find that using popular hashtags such as #FridayFeeling get high impression rates and our Twitter Analytics backs this up so it’s worth considering this when scheduling content.
Similarly to Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights offers a unique view of how well your posts are doing on Facebook. It can look quite technical as the information displays in graphs, but the most important things to look at are how many likes you’ve got and the number of clicks, comments and shares each post receives. Although Facebook Insights is tailored towards promoting it’s paid for advertising options (the ‘Boost Post’ button and ‘Paid’ element of the graphs), it is a great way of seeing the content that your followers interact with the most. Another key feature is the ability to see how many comments you’ve gained on shared posts; this is something that you can’t see on the original post but it provides a more accurate measure of the engagement and interaction of your followers.
Here at Dragonfly PR we manage social media for a number of our clients and we’re experts in generating engaging content and juggling multiple accounts. To find out how we can help you to manage your social media, visit the website or call us on 01709 300130.