Social Media Tools

Welcome to my first blog post! I appreciate you taking the time to read this and I hope you enjoy it! This first blog post is about tools used in social media. I began by searching for an article about some of the trending tools at the moment and came across a great one. It is titled 50 Top Tools for Social Media Monitoring, Analytics, and Management and it was written by Pam Dyer and published online via Social Media Today (You can follow Pam Here if you would like to know more about her and the work she does). The article is based around 50 of the top social media tools, free and paid, available to consumers and businesses. I decided to focus on two of the tools I was familiar with, HootSuite and BackTweets, and then a third I had never heard of, uberVU.

HootSuite– Free & Cost $ Options

HootSuite is something that I was personally introduced to about six months ago and it’s quite a time saving tool. I am able to manage my tweets and posts all in the same spot and can schedule them for weeks in advance when I’m not going to be around. The dashboard system that they feature is easy to understand and really helps the user stay on top of the social media world. The website states this about the company, “HootSuite is a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. Launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow audiences, and distribute targeted messages using HootSuite’s unique social media dashboard. Streamline team workflow with scheduling and assignment tools and reach audiences with geo-targeting functionality. Invite multiple collaborators to manage social networks securely, plus provide custom reports using the comprehensive social analytics tools for measurement. Key social network integrations include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and new Google+ Pages, plus a suite of social content apps for YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and more.” I think HootSuite is something that will continue to grow in popularity and companies should take advantage of its time saving features.

BackTweets– Free

BackTweets defines themselves on their website as follows, “BackTweets is a twitter time machine which enables you to search through a tweet history for tweets that link back to your site. As a free web app, BackTweets lets you search through a tweet archive for URLs sent via twitter. URLs are found regardless of the form they were tweeted in and include: full URL links, shortened URLs and URLs without the WWW prefix. BackTweets is a great tool for tracking your social media pulse- see how many people are talking about you, who is talking about you, and what they are saying.” This is a great tool if you are looking to find who is searching for you or your company on Twitter. There are some downfalls to this tool as well though. It is Twitter specific and cannot search any of the other social media networks, it only searches the database for urls, and the owners of the domain name and tool have been consistently changing over the years. Saying that though, it is a really great tool when you are looking to expand in the Twitter universe and see the best audiences to target.

uberVU– Cost $

I had never heard of uberVU before reading the article but after doing some research I think it could be a very useful tool. The thing that really stuck out to me is that they deliver opportunities for audience engagement through an automated platform on the majority of the social media networks. It’s in some ways similar to HootSuite in the dashboard that they have set up and the amount of social media networks that can be monitored. They define themselves on their website as follows, “uberVU was born out of frustration with first generation social media tools for the enterprise. As marketers, we believe social is going to revolutionize how we connect with our customers and audience. Building that relationship with first generation tools, however, is so much manual work that it might not be worth it. UberVU was built with the understanding that marketers shouldn’t waste time running reports and numbers in 10 different dashboards just to get a sense of what’s going on. We deliver monitoring, engagement, collaboration and reporting in a single dashboard. And we automate most of a social media marketer’s tedious manual work: finding insights, detecting influencer mentions, detecting trending stories and suggesting engaging content to post.”

I would love to hear from some people who have familiarity with these tools and have experience with them. Please comment or share any thoughts or suggestions you may have as well.

Adam