There is a variety of social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest, to mention just a few. Each has thousands of active users and its peculiarities: Facebook has the most users; Twitter is perfect for promoting brands and companies visibility since it’s not so friendship oriented; Pinterest, perhaps the newest of them all, is steadily growing and is closely related to marketing goals, as it allows easy sharing of likes and interests.
Companies face the challenge of managing their image and relationship with consumers on multiple platforms, and no self-respecting brand can neglect its presence in any of the most popular networks. However, the truth is that to manage them all in a traditional way can be too costly a task for any individual or team. Keep in mind that social networks are not a guarantee of success per se. Only its professional usage with careful studying and monitoring can ensure a successful campaign.
Fortunately, several utilities that exist today enable us to optimize management of our online presence in social networks. To select a network management tool that best suits our needs – or those of our business, – it is good to keep in mind the particularities of each.
Allied to our online visibility strategies
The first tool that should be among favorites of any community manager or regular user of multiple social networks is an integral manager of social media campaigns. Applications such as HootSuite manage various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even WordPress from a single interface. In addition, this tool provides detailed reports about our contacts in each social network, track mentions and traffic redirected to our site from online socializing platforms, thanks to its integration with Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. Other applications that simultaneously manage multiple social networks and send a message from all of them in a few clicks are TweetDeck and Ping.fm.
Talking about Twitter, there are some special tools such as Crowdbooster that provide regular reports on our fans activity and the impact of each tweet. Thus, it is possible to determine, for example, which are the best days and times to publish updates and even schedule them to be sent automatically. Whereas, Twellow directory looks for Twitter users according to their interests and characteristics in order to find potential clients and strategic partners among surfers.
Another key factor to managing our presence on social networks is the analysis of the results. Most networks provide their own measuring tools. In addition, tools like Google Analytics measure the effect of actions in social networks on the traffic to our website. There are specific applications that can measure the influence of actions on the world of online sociability. Such is the case with Klout, a tool for measuring influence on social networks and seeing, for example, how many contacts are effectively reached with the message.
To effectively position a company in social networks and ensure that its image reflects the best of its business, it is essential to do so in an efficient and organized manner. Including social networks in a marketing strategy is the first big step. Add to this development of a consistent strategy and the proper usage of management tools, and this step will definitely be decisive.
