Struggling to understand the social media phenomenon, and how it relates to your B2B marketing? Sorry to break it to you, but 80% of your efforts can be alleviated by the services and tools available to you – if you know where to look. And if you don’t, don’t worry. We’ve trawled the net and found the top tools for you:
Pull in and monitor Twitter feeds and accounts within the web-based CRM giant Salesforce.com. Follow up leads and generate cases based on a tweet in the CRM, and the fully integrated platform lets you monitor and evaluate them with your regular workflow.
Manage multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn and WordPress blogs, and set up multiple access for your people. Post messages across different social networks, track stats and receive alerts. Oh, and don’t pay anything – it’s free!
A CRM tool that offers the same benefits as Hootsuite, but specifically for Twitter. You can also keep an eye on trends and keywords to generate leads. Also free, unless you want the enterprise option used by the likes of Ford and Jetblue – a *cough* snip at $1500 per month.
A definite must-have, use this tool to control your presence across various platforms. Scheduling posts, monitoring traffic, feedback and analysis and managing user access all become a breeze – particularly as everything is available on one user-friendly dashboard.
Radian6 (Now owned by Salesforce)
This genius little tool doesn’t wait for your customers to come to you – it trawls the social media world listening to online tweets, posts and blogs and tells you when someone is in need of your product or service. Integrate it with Salesforce.com for maximum lead generation.
Starting at $50 a month, Spredfast offers most of the services above but also throws in metric reporting and tracking so you can see what methods are working and which aren’t, and keep an eye on other industry or competitor sites.
It’s strengths lie in its social monitoring and analysis capability, and alerts you to conversation fluctuations, topics from key influencers and sentiment analysis. Pricey at $200 a month but if your reach in the social media world is extensive, it could be exactly what you need to stay on top.
As well as tracking conversations, topics and keywords like Radian6, it also follows the tone and perceptions of a brand so you know how actual and potential customers are feeling about your product. It also has the great monitoring potential of Social Radar, flagging crisis and customer service issues so you can step in and save the day.
Another monitoring and analytics service that also includes viral video stats, it differentiates itself with the additional service by allowing you to target profiles by location, and by having its own API that means you can integrate it into other business solutions.
This is where you can really dig deep! You might have 300 Twitter mentions, but what does that mean? By tracking the in-depth discussions on forums and blogs, you can get a clearer, detailed picture of your service or product and its impact on social media communities.
With so many tools available to you on today’s worldwideweb, which one is your favourite?