What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 2

Published in

Inside Revenue

15 min readAug 28, 2018

The Intermediate Guide

In Part 1, I went over what Social Media monitoring is and why you should use tools to monitor your Social Media. There were 8 great reasons you should use a tool to monitor your Social Media, but the most important one is that is can help you to keep your customers happy and can save you time. If you missed this article you can click here to read “What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”.

Social Media has become a core element of marketing across businesses of all types and sizes. You always need to be maintaining active optimized profiles, sharing industry-related update, amplifying your own content, as well as engaging with prospects, influencers, advocates, and customers. Over the years, there have been dozens of Social Media monitoring tools launched, all designed to fulfill some or all of the elements above. In this article, I will go over a couple of the tools in the freemium categories to help you to decide which would be best to use.

How Can Social Media Tools Help Me Hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?

In this article we will cover:

#1 Freemium Social Media Monitoring Tools

#2 Choosing The Social Media Tool For You

Let’s get going…
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#1 Freemium Social Media Monitoring Tools

Freemium is a business model, especially on the Internet, whereby basic services are provided free of charge while more advanced features must be paid for. There are a lot of Social Media monitoring tools that use this strategy to show you some of the benefits of their product but reserving their great features for when you pay.

This may not seem beneficial but there are some of these softwares that can give you great services and benefits even on the free version. In this section I will be looking at a couple of these softwares.

Namely:

Hootsuite
Buffer
Cyfe
Postific

Hootsuite

Hootsuite was designed to help you do more with your Social Media. It allows you to manage your Social Media in one place. Hootsuite is one of the more well-known platforms which has a lot of features and is used by over 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies. They are integrated into Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to give you a full understanding of your audiences on these platforms.

On the free account you are able to have 3 Social Media profiles and schedule up to 30 messages. If you need more accounts or schedules you can upgraded to one of their other plans.

Some of Hootsuite’s features include:

Scheduling
Gives you the chance to save time by scheduling your social posts. This allows you to keep your social presence active 24/7 by automatically scheduling hundreds of Social Media posts at once, across your social accounts.

They have a great content calendar feature as well which gives you a clear overview on all your scheduled Social Media content. This allows you to keep on top of your posts on Social Media. Hootsuite have also developed an app to allow you to schedule on the move and an easy chrome extension to allow you to schedule content that you see while on the web.

Content Curation
This feature allows you to manage social content with ease. Stay on message with pre-approved content your teams can post, stored in your favorite cloud file service. Tagging, searching, and usage stats make curating content a breeze. All of this is available with Hootsuite.

A fun feature they have allows you to discover new content to repost by creating search streams by hashtags, location or keywords. When you enter these it will find new compelling content for you to curate and share on your Social Media platforms

Social Analytics
Gives you the ability to track and prove social ROI. It measure the impact of your Social Media campaigns through comprehensive reporting as well as measure conversions by social channel and separate ROI between owned and paid media.

Hootsuite gives you a great overview look in the reporting so you can track you key metrics on Facebook Instagram and Twitter.

Monitoring

You are able to surface the conversations that matter. This means you can find and filter social conversations by keyword, hashtag, and location — in multiple languages — to hear what people are saying about your brand, competitors, and industry.

You are able to create custom streams of social content, organized by tabs in a way that makes sense to you. Then share them with teammates with a single click.

Buffer

With Buffer you are able to curate and schedule content to many different Social Media accounts. The accounts that Buffer currently work with are: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Linkedin and Pinterest.

This allows you to seamlessly post content directly to your profiles and allows you to view how your content is being engaged with.

Buffer Free allows you to schedule up to 10 posts to 3 social accounts and removes the ability to post to Pinterest. They also offer an App and Chrome extension much like Hootsuite which allows you to curate content while you are searching the web and schedule your content on the move.

Once you move onto a paid version of Buffer (which starts at $15 a month) you are able to track engagement on each individual post to see how your content is performing and which resonate most with your audience. You can also check out your engagement levels to identify, set and measure goals and build up your long-term intuition on overall performance.

Features Of Buffer Include:

Browser Extension — Save something to share for later, no matter when or where you find it
Mobile Apps — Save time and get more done by working from anywhere with our apps for iOS and Android
RSS Feed — Publish content from your favorite sites, with one click of a button
Social Analytics — Get the data you need to keep getting better and better on Social Media
Pablo Image Creator — Create beautiful images easily to make your posts
Social Media Calendar — Organize how and when your content gets shared with ease
Video & GIF Uploader — Add richer content to your posts through our fast video and GIF uploader

Cyfe

Cyfe is an all-in-one business dashboard which allows you to monitor Social Media, web analytics, marketing, sales, support, infrastructure.

They have multiple pre-built widgets which allow you to pull data from popular services such as Google and Salesforce. They also have widgets for Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and many more which allows you to pull this data and create dashboards to monitor all you campaigns and goals.

With their Social Media capabilities, Cyfe allows you to use real-time data and metrics to start tracking how your brand or clients are doing across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, Youtube, Linkedin, and Vimeo, and measure the return on investment of your social efforts.

Cyfe makes it quick & easy to automate your reporting, provide precise measurement on all Social Media statistics (such as engagement, fans & likes) help you monitor your top performing messages, media, & posts, and track all of your Social Media analytics with our free dashboards. This means you can easily show clients, colleagues, managers, and your team how your Social Media performance is impacting your brand and organization, while saving you time and making your job effortless. And we’re not just Social Media — Cyfe also offers Google Analytics, Salesforce, Xero, Quickbooks, Adwords, and dozens of other prebuilt integrations that give you easy-to-use, real-time dashboards for marketing, clients, startups, SEO, finance, sales, project management, IT, and much more, making Cyfe the best all-in-one online dashboard for all of your organization’s analytics.

Postific

Postific is the leading Social Media dashboard to manage and measure your social networks. It is great for marketing, managing, and listening to your Social Media. This ensures you are up to date with your clients and your campaigns.

Here Are A Few Of The Key Features Offered:

Marketing
Schedule unlimited number of messages for up to 10 different social networks and never miss the right time for posting

Schedule Tweets and Facebook posts automatically to post your content at optimal times.
Manage more social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ Personal, Google+ Business and others!
Integrate your own RSS Feeds and auto post to all your social networks AUTOMATICALLY
Track your posts engagement and analyze the results for all your posts and social networks in one place.

Management
Manage up to 10 different social networks from one single place and track the engagement for each of them

Manage unlimited number of Facebook Groups.
Track the engagement and click-through stats for all your social profiles
Use the Branded URL shortener to promote your brand and keep a track of the click-through

Listening
Monitor the Social Media conversations that matter to your business

Monitor your own feeds for specific keywords or activities
Monitor the global feeds for specific words or phrases
Listen for multiple languages and hashtags
Monitor specific comments or tweets and answer directly from Postific
Set up alerts sending you notification if people are saying something about you

Additional Features Include

Publishing

Post To Multiple Accounts
With Postific you can connect all your social accounts only once and then post to all of them your content with a single click of a button.
Organize Your Social Accounts Into Groups
Together with that you can create your groups containing specific social accounts and instead of manually selecting all your accounts every time you make a post, you just select your group of accounts.
Auto Load The URLs You Are Posting
When you are posting a link to your social networks Postific gets the content of the Link, its image and all the information necessary to make a perfectly looking post.
Customize Posts In The Way You Want
Together with the auto loading of URLs Postific has full set of options to customize the title or description of your post and together with that to upload custom image for it. Postific take care of all the other optimization necessary to post your content in the right way to all different social networks.
Tag Your Posts With The Right Keywords
One of the biggest advantages of Postific is that you can optimize your posts automatically for all social networks when you just define the tags related to the post you are posting. Tags are very helpful for optimizing your content so it can be found easily.
Schedule Your Posts
With Postific you can build a big queue of scheduled posts which will be sent exactly when you scheduled them. Within a few minutes you can build the posting queue for the whole week and you don’t have to worry anymore that you have to post early in the morning or late during the evening to all different social networks

Tracking

Bit.ly Tracking
With Postific you can have two ways of tracking — Branded tracking and Bit.ly Tracking. Bit.ly is very famous URL shortener that is used by millions of people and it’s very popular. It’s included into all our packages and it just requires you to have free account on bit.ly
Branded URL Shortener
One of the biggest advantages of Postific is that you can post links to different social networks with your own domain name and still have access to your click-through statistics.

Reporting

Individual Engagement Tracking
When you are posting to multiple networks it’s very hard to track how many shares, likes or comments you have for each of your posts.
With Postific you don’t have to do anything in order to get all this data well organized for you and get the real picture of how your engagement goes with every single post that you are sending.
Track The TOP Engaged Locations
Postific is providing detailed information about the countries and the amount of the clicks coming from each country so you can easily target your posts or ads to the right audience.
Get The TOP Referrals
Most of the time people don’t have any idea who is the main source of traffic for their posts and if it’s coming from the right social network. With Postific you will always figure out which are the websites or social networks bringing you most of the traffic.
Extracting List Of Engaged Users
It’s almost impossible to know which are the specific social users/fans or followers engaged with your content.
That’s why Postific automatically extracts all the people engaged to your post and shows you all the information that it can take from the social network.
Also Postific shows additional information like the actual comment left for your post. All the data is summarized from all social networks so you can easily access and analyze it.

There are many more features that postific has. They are analytics, listening, social inbox, lead capture and contact centre.

“On listening: when you’re listening to any prospect, do so as if you’re hard of hearing. Visualize them, and listen as if you need to read their lips” — Art Sobczak (30 years helping others to sell and prospect using the phone, without the fear or rejection) @ArtSobczak

#2 Choosing The Social Media Tool For You

When it comes to picking a tool for your business, there are just so many great options out there, so many wonderful, time-saving features, it’s a tall task to know exactly what’s right for you. The tool you choose is often a key ingredient when it comes to hitting your Social Media marketing goals, because it can help you drive traffic and engagement, as well as measure how you’re doing.

Each tool has its strengths and weaknesses, and there’s no single perfect tool for everyone. So how do you figure out which one’s going to be the best fit for you?

Below Are 3 Important Questions To Ask Yourself Up Front:

1. What are you looking to accomplish with your Social Media marketing efforts?
2. What prompted you to start looking for a new tool?

3. What experience do you want your social team to have with the tool?

The next thing to consider is what are your must-have features. The best way to determine this is to write down what you consider to be a must have and what you consider to be a nice to have. Once you have this list together, circle your top five must haves and use these to rate tools to determine which one will work best.

Once you have this list to rate your tools you will need to start researching. There are many places that you can turn to do your research but here are a couple of ideas to help you save time and get you off on the right foot.

Google — Here are some keywords to check out: best Social Media tools, best Social Media marketing tools, and best Social Media management tools
YouTube — Searching for these keywords will turn up some great video reviews: best Social Media marketing tools, best Social Media management tools, and Social Media tools for business
Product Hunt — Try a keyword search for ‘Social Media’, and check out our Social Media tools collection
AlternativeTo — You’ll find a nice selection of options by checking out alternatives to Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social
Capterra — You can find reviews for a ton of Social Media marketing products
Quora — Read through Q&A’s in the ‘Social Media marketing tools’ section of Quora

Now that you have researched and found your shortlist of tools use the free trial option which most tools have to try them out and figure out which one works best for you and your team. Keep in mind the list of features you choose previously to ensure the platform meets all of those requirements.

Below Are 9 Things You Should Consider When You Are Evaluating Your Social Media Tools

1. User Experience
You’re likely to be using this tool regularly, maybe even daily. So it feels super important to find a tool that gives you or your team a great experience. The best tools tend to be intuitive and easy to use. And if you find you or your team are getting lost or struggling without training you could lose a lot of time, energy, and momentum.

2. Analytics & Reporting
When you think about your team’s overall Social Media goals, what are the key metrics you’ll need to track and report on? Will this tool help you measure those? If you need extremely detailed reports on a consistent basis, some tools have more advanced reporting capabilities and may be a great fit. For many companies, however, being able to measure the engagement they’re getting with each individual post — and tracking their account growth over time — is more than enough.

3. Team Collaboration Tools
Will you be inviting team members to collaborate with this tool? Some tools make it super easy to manage your team. The best ones allow you to easily:

Add team members
Decide which social media accounts each person has access to
Set permission levels
And review posts before publishing

It’s important to make sure the tool you choose gives you the capabilities you need as a manager/team lead!

4. Customer Support
At some point you or someone on your team is likely going to have a question or need help. When that time comes, will you have access to customer support? And if so, how good is it — both in terms of speed and quality?

The best companies don’t just provide you with software. They’re also there to help out when you need it and advise you on the best Social Media practices as well as help you be successful and accomplish your goals using their product

5. Training
On top of customer support, it might also be worth exploring what other options the company provides you — in terms of training, education, customer success managers, etc. These resources can be a great tipping point in the decision process.
Some companies provide in-depth tutorials to help you make the switch and get started on the right foot. And with many of the more popular tools, there are tons of 3rd party educational resources that can help you get the most out of it.

6. Security
Another thing to consider is: How secure is the tool? ? And what security features does it provide? Take the time to make sure your tool is secure, because publishing to social profiles is extremely important for brands and you don’t want anyone who shouldn’t post being able to!

7. Integrations
Sometimes you need to pass data between tools, or you might want to automate some of your Social Media activities. If you absolutely need a specific integration that isn’t available, this could be a deal-breaker.

8. Pricing
There are a few things to consider when it comes to pricing.

First, check the availability of free features, and at what price the more advanced features become “pay-only.” Second, would you prefer an all-inclusive cost, even if you’re paying for features you don’t need? Or would you rather pay only for the features, social accounts, and team members you need? Third, are you okay with signing an annual contract or would you prefer to pay month-to-month? Each company will have a slightly different offering here.

9. Scale
Your Social Media presence is likely going to grow over time — how does adding more team members, accounts, or Social Media updates affect pricing?

Once you have consider these factors, tested out the different platforms and discussed them all among your team you are ready to decide which one will work best for you.

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Social Media monitoring can play a huge role in the success of your Social Media campaign and the ultimate success of your business. As Social Media is completely unfiltered, it is important to track your brand Social Media constantly. This gives you a glimpse into what people are saying about your brand as well as how your campaigns and content are performing. You have the opportunity to listen, learn, and engage because of this monitoring. Through continuous brand monitoring, you can collect feedback and implement changes that will go towards improving your brand image.

In my next article, “What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)”, I will be going over some of the best practices surrounding Social Media monitoring and the tools you can work with as well as give you a couple of tips you can use for Social Media monitoring.