An abrasive and highly competitive battle for online audiences is raging on the internet today and this has been largely driven by the acceptance and aggressive use of digital marketing strategies by marketers from all sorts of sectors and industries. Social media is a tried and tested platform for this kind of marketing but often, marketers are faced with the challenge of managing or juggling all these networks and using them effectively. It is for this reason that social media marketing and management tools have become increasingly popular. Here, we shall highlight some useful social media tools.
A major characteristic of successful social media pages is their look, feel, interactivity and ease of use. One valuable tool that enables a straightforward approach to creating appealing Facebook pages is Shortstack a useful application that makes this process easy for businesses. The use of good content is key and with this in hand posting it periodically, becomes the next step. Buffer, a web based service allows you to schedule updates or posts on social media. All one has to do is upload or top up content which is then posted at interval over a specified period.
Organisations with a large employee base and that are oriented towards digital marketing can make use of their employees’ social circles and communities to a reasonable level. This can be done by using Addvocate another excellent service that offers unique capability. The marketing department can alert employees when relevant marketing content is available, this is done via a browser plugin, and from here this message can be passed on or broadcast to social pages of the employee. There are also portals that allow simultaneous management of different social networks from a centralised location. This makes it easier to have consistent content across all relevant pages and for this; TweetDeck or HootSuite can be used. Using images with content is an excellent attention grabber and finding relevant images which are free to use, can be tricky at times. This is an interesting problem that has been solved by an equally interesting service, Compfight. There are a plethora of tools that make social media marketing easier and therefore, the choice is left to marketers.
