Social media apps and dashboard programs help you keep your accounts under control and easy to manage. They take a lot of the work out of your routine daily tasks. However, there are a slew of different programs out there that can help you in different ways, and it can drive you crazy sifting through all the reviews to find the right one. Here are five of the most popular and highly recommended platforms.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a dashboard program that you can use to manage all of your media sites. You don’t have to log in to each one to monitor activity or send out updates. When you make one update on Hootsuite, it goes to all of your accounts. You can manage up to five accounts at once using a free account.
With Hootsuite, you can schedule your updates so that you don’t have to send them out manually. This is a great labor saving tool and it also improves your campaign by letting you select the best times to send out messages. It also gives you customized reports that let you analyze activity among your followers across all networks.
Tweetdeck is for Twitter only. It organizes your feeds, filtering, scheduling and monitoring. Its dashboard lets you see all of your Twitter activity at once, which is especially helpful when you’ve gone from hundreds to thousands of followers. Once you hit the thousand mark, clicking the refresh button turns into a nightmare. It’s too much to take in at once, and Tweetdeck makes it more digestible.
You can segment your followers using Tweetdeck, creating columns based around certain categories. You can also use it to get data on any individual user with just a click. These features make it useful for getting to know your followers better.
Like Hootsuite, Sprout Social lets you manage all social media profiles in one place. It has a free 30-day trial so that you can try it out first. What makes Sprout Social special are its mobile applications. It offers a number of location-based features that work with Foursquare and other geo-local sites.
Sprout Social is also good for reputation management. You can set it so that it alerts you anytime your brand or certain keywords are mentioned.
Postling’s dashboard lets you see all social media activity at once and lets you make one post that goes to all social media sites. It’s great for seeing all comments or questions across networks so that you can reply quickly to them. You can also integrate it with your email so that its notifications come straight into your inbox. Like Sprout Social, it has an alerts function which is much faster than Google Alerts. You’re notified almost instantly when someone mentions your brand. Postling has a 30-day trial for $1.
Crowdbooster’s strength is in its analytics. It shows detailed statistics for your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Crowdbooster is particularly great for measuring follower engagement. Not only does it show how you’re doing, it also recommends actions you can take to increase customer engagement, saving you the time thinking of ideas yourself. It also has a feature that makes searching for influencers on both social media networks quick and easy.
When choosing a social media management program to use, start by deciding which features are most important to you. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, so choose the one that best meets those needs.
Next Steps:
1. Review each option listed.
2. Decide which features are most important for you.
3. Download the free version for the one that sounds best.
4. Try it out for the next week and see if it’s a good fit for you.
