Gone are the days where companies only have to concentrate on one or two social media platforms. Nowadays, keeping up with social trends involves multi-dimensional social media marketing and often the use of numerous networks. The good news for marketing directors is that even through all the chaos, there are always resources that spring up to make your social media management easier and more streamlined. We have compiled four of what we think are some really winning social media tools that can help you reach, engage and connect with your social media fans.
Compfight
If your company uses a lot of imagery from the Internet as a means to stimulate the minds of your visual followers you will love Compfight. Using the Flickr API, Compfight allows users to utilize its image search engine to find imagery that is cheap or free for commercial use. If you are grabbing images from other places you are running the risk of copyright infringement, meaning you do not have the right to do so. With Compfight the stresses and worries about finding and using images legally is over. The tool even allows you to give the photographer proper attribution, making all of your photos completely legit and free and clear of any copyright issues.
Addvocate
If you have ever started a new social media brand account you probably have wished that you could just transfer all of your personal contacts over to your brand page to build the audience. Addvocate does not do that but they do the next best thing: allow company employees to utilize their personal social media accounts for the benefit of the brand. Fact is, given the number of social media followers each individual has, this can often mean more combined followers than a brand has itself. By leveraging this knowledge, Addvocate was designed to provide a platform where employees could receive brand content recommendations from a central marketing team so that they could compound the efforts of social sharing. What’s more, the software provides informative data on who is sharing content, the engagement it receives, and details on how brands can increase total social presence through their own network. Addvocate offers free as well as paid packages, depending on your user workforce.
Tagboard
Hashtags have made a big impact on the social media world and Twitter alone is not the only one who leverages their ease of use. You may already use hashtags to monitor specific social media channels or to create social media marketing campaigns around your own keywords. With Tagboard, a new social media tool, you now have a central location to monitor hashtags across all the hashtag-using social media platforms! This means you can now use the service to monitor conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Google +, Instagram and Vine, create content specifically for each of these channels based on conversations, and even pull leads in real time.
Post Planner
There are already a few Facebook content management tools out there but Post Planner also provides you the ability to source and add content to your queue for later posting. For example, let’s say you are a real estate firm who likes to pull data from your local real estate news website. By adding them as a content source Post Planner can automatically send you relevant content from the website that you can in turn decide to repost on your Facebook page to the benefit of your fans. You can also pull content easily from your Twitter accounts, blogs, or add outside content to your queue to save time and effort.
Use These Tools Today!
There are many great social media resources out there that can help marketing managers more effectively manage their brand presence. Use the above tools to make your life a little bit simpler and to get the most out of your social media network.
