Choosing The Right Social Media Marketing Tools | The Communication Blog

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Choosing The Right Social Media Marketing Tools

By Ryan Bersitallat


For any company that intends to build a reputation and brand on the networks, social media marketing tools are not an optional choice any longer. Just opening accounts on the networks and allocating a staffer to engage in conversation and put out messages is simply not enough any more. What it requires is a professional approach, with the right methods and the right tool(s).

The exponential growth of the networks has resulted in a mini-boom in the tools area, and all kinds are now available for every kind of person and company on all the networks. There are some that are web based, while others can be run from desktops. Some have a single dashboard with one login to access all the accounts, while others just monitor and send intimations for each account.

Some are free and to be used by individuals, while others are good enough to be enterprise level systems. It's even possible to collect metrics and calculate ROI using an advanced tool. Some are specific to a platform, while some may even have multi-language support.

Picking the right one has to be based on several things like the company's size and the size of the team, not to mention the budget for the campaign. An enterprise level operation with an active team dedicated for the networks will need a solid tool like Spredfast. It is an SMMS aka a social media management system which offers a unified login for all the accounts and networks and supports an enterprise team.

A message just has to be typed out once, and Spredfast will customize it for each network before sending it out. This ensures a bit of a distinct personality for the company on each of the networks, while team members don't have to go about replicating the work. It helps that this tool is capable of measuring metrics and providing an overall ROI for the entire team's efforts for all networks combined. Hootsuite is another choice that can fulfill most of these functions, but without the bells and whistles.

For individuals, TweetDeck is a very useful tool that helps one person manage multiple accounts. CoTweet goes in the opposite direction, and is handy if multiple team members are posting on the same account. It can track each person's activity separately.

No matter which one fits the bill, the fact remains that without using social media marketing tools, it is virtually impossible not to get drowned by increasing numbers of followers and friends. With the tool, each mention can be responded to, and messages can be put out on all the networks with a minimum of effort and the capability to figure out ROI. Relevant keywords and brand name mentions can also be monitored. The sum of it is that a tool is not an optional item on the social media plan of action.




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