Social Media Monitoring Tools
You no longer have salespeople knocking on your door and rousing you from your sleepy stupor in order to extol the virtues of their products. Neither do you have the pretentious counter girl looking down her nose each time you ask a question. Rather, you have a new turf in which the customer is the undisputed king and the one who’s calling all the shots. If he feels your brand is pretentious or too intrusive, you may as well have something to worry about.
The customer today knows exactly what your brand proposition is, much before you can even open your mouth to speak. With a ready finger, he knows your company’s net worth, your newest CEO and the latest controversy embroiling your brand. Yes, this customer defines whether your business does or dies and how your business chooses to appeal to him online is what defines your social media strategy.
Utilised correctly, social media can keep the cash registers ringing up sales like never before besides presenting an enormous insight bank (which you can use to generate more sales).
Here are a few guidelines on how you can do it right
Hoot Suite
Hoot Suite is a comprehensive social media management website,so you can manage all your social campaigns and networks from one single dashboard. What’s more, the site has a feature wherein you can schedule posts/ messages for the future (so you can plan your social media campaign weeks in advance). You can add team members and keep everyone is in the loop, on the job. Set up the broad ranging feed streams and you’ll get to see what’s happening on different networks.
Slideshare
Slideshare is a great slide hosting service that you can use to upload PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDF Portfolios with the added feature of rating, commenting or sharing the uploaded content. You can share it publicly with your social media followers or keep it private. You can tweak some changes, to make it more purposeful and targeted to your audience or keep it intact. As you may choose to go about it, Slideshare presents a fantastic way of uploading and sharing your slide decks for viewing on the site or on your hand held
YouTube
Marketers are discovering newer and more unique ways of reaching out to an even greater audience through youtube. Creating viral videos, brand walkthrough videos or general social videos have gone on to create an engaging social media tool. Videos of CEO presentations or a popular employee seminar are some of the vids that can be used as effective HR tools for employee recognition and retention techniques.
Pinterest was always renowned as an image sharing network, however it’s proving its efficacy as a superior social media platform for presenting pictures of products (product pins). Utilised correctly, this platform can capture the minute detailed pics of your brand or product.
NeedTagger
NeedTagger tool allows you to leverage and find new business opportunities via Twitter. Essentially, this tool acts as a search engine for Twitter and finds for you discussions that your brand might be interested in. This way you are an active participant and can input your brands features and participate in discussions/ grievances pertaining to your product/ service. Needless to say, it’s a good way of promoting your brand and generating more sales.
Google Alerts
Chances are you’re already using Google alerts and have several linked alerts set ups for your brand, your business and finally yourself. Just in case you haven’t still explored this tool, its time to do so. It’ll give you a good opportunity to stay tuned in with your topics of interest and allow you to be prompt in your blog posting section.
Cayzu
Cayzu makes real time interaction and engagement with customers easy. This tool allows you to address customer complaints, suggestions and conversations from multiple channels via a single screen itself. Super convenient when you want to address the audience pronto.
Summary
Engaging your audience is considered as the most important step for your business and using social media efficiently ensures that you’re addressing your followers and establishing a relationship that is relevant to your brand. What’s more, by using social media correctly you’re going to generate more sales and create many more opportunities for promoting your brand presence online.
