When it comes to managing a Challenger Brand’s social media presence, no doubt you are feeling a little overwhelmed. By now you have discovered that setting up social media accounts is the easy part.
Engaging your potential customers in a meaningful dialogue that results in them making a purchase and becoming true ambassadors of your brand, now that’s much harder. The truth is, the notion that social media marketing campaigns are great, “because social media is inexpensive is a big misnomer. While there few hard costs associated with social media, there is an enormous time investment and expertise that is needed to make them work successfully.
The one immutable rule about all social media is that if you are not willing to put in the time required to manage it, it will not work. All social media programs require a remarkable time investment to be effective and successful. Not all companies realize the time commitment needed and as a result never achieve their full potential, or worse, cause irreversible harm to their brand.
There are (thankfully) quite a few online tools that have been created to make this process far more efficient for Challenger Brands. The following is a list of easy-to-use online tools that are designed to help you maximize the time investment needed when it comes to managing the key social media channels your company has chosen to champion.
1. MarketMeSuite – With MarketMeSuite, you can build client relationships and organic, targeted leads very quickly. It can update Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools rapidly and lets you manage multiple apps, schedule posts and allows multiple users to login at any time.
2. HootSuite – Recently acquiring Seesmic and adding to their roster of users, this is a tool that allows you to manage multiple social media channels through one dashboard. If you have a company with more than one contributor to your social media program, HootSuite is a good solution.
3. TweetDeck – Like HootSuite, TweetDeck provides a way to track many of your social media channels on one dashboard. It can be a time-saver and a productivity enhancer, assuming you’re not easily distracted.
4. ExactTarget – ExactTarget’s Interactive Marketing Hub provides a holistic solution to email, mobile and social media marketing. With access to real-time tracking and graphical reporting, the Hub gives you immediate visibility and control over all of your marketing campaigns.
5. NutshellMail – If you are easily distracted, NutshellMail may be the tool for you. This tool, much like TweetDeck, helps you track all of your social media channels, but instead of constant updates, sends you a single email per day describing your accounts’ activity.
6. Sprout Social – Another organizing tool, Sprout Social manages multiple social networks from one dashboard, allowing you to optimize your outreach in each channel, identify people interested in your brand and convert them to loyal consumers.
7. Thismoment – Their recently introduced Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC) uses Thismoment’s publishing platform to combine their design, your content and multimedia user generated content into one “channel” that can be pushed to many different social media outlets.
8. Awareness Social Marketing Hub – This platform is ideal for larger social media campaigns with multiple people monitoring and executing the program. In addition to aggregating social network information, the Hub allows marketers to set up workflows in order to coordinate efforts across a marketing team.
9. Expion – Built with multiple-location business or franchises in mind, Expion allows corporate offices to oversee and manage each of their locations’ individual social media accounts while still allowing store managers or franchisees to have some control over the account. This helps brands maintain continuity across locations while still allowing for regional-based promotions or content relevant only to the local stores.
10. Syncapse SocialTALK – Perfect for businesses, this tool helps you control your presence across different platforms, manage multiple social media accounts from one platform, establish multiple user access levels, and monitor incoming traffic.
On an unrelated note, be sure to check out our new corporate video.
