Managing a social networking marketing program can be easier if you use the right ingredients and tools. Listening to what your customers are saying – whether they like or dislike your products or services and whether they are advocates, evangelists or detractors, listening is the first step in understanding how your brand is being perceived. The ingredients you will need for your social media marketing are:
- Launch
- Measure
- optimize
You will need use the proper tools to blend your ingredients, the tools are as follows:
- Listening and monitoring tools
- Editorial, publishing and content syndication tools
- Conversation measurement tools
Listening and Monitoring Tools:
Listening to what your customers are saying – whether they like or dislike your products or services and whether they are advocates, evangelists or detractors, listening is the first step in understanding how your brand is being perceived. Following are some tools which can help you to listen to what your customers are saying:
Two popular listening and monitoring tools are “monitter” or “Tweet Deck”. These free online devices allow you to monitor Twitter for keywords and watch what people are saying about keywords related to your products and services.
Another free online monitoring tool that you can use is Google Alerts. You can set up alerts for keywords relating to your business and receive streaming or batched reports.
For scanning a lot of news regarding your line-of-business go to Alltop. Alltop is a free online news aggregation service that scans news sites, blogs, and forums to present a one-stop shop of thousands of news stories about a certain topic or trend.
Editorial, Publishing and Content Syndication Tools:
Some free editorial, publishing and content syndication tools are: Co-Tweet and HootSuite. These tools allow you to communicate marketing messages, offer publishing tools, and scheduling for brand accounts.
TubeMogul lets you syndicate your video content to multiple UCG video sites (YouTube and some 15 others), and then track views and engagement metrics. It is offered in both free and paid versions.
Ping.FM allows you to review and publish status updates across multiple social networks simultaneously, and manage multiple social media accounts in one place and is free.
Conversation Measurement Tools:
Some free Conversational Measurement Tools are: Twendz, Trendrr, and Hubspot. These programs monitor and measure social networking conversations such as Twitter and Facebook for your brand or phrases that you input to see where conversations about their brand are happening, and how their industry, sector, or topic is “trending” across the social media web.
Tags: marketing, SEO, Social Networking, web design