How to Work with Social Media Tools

Just as television turned a nation of people who listened to media content into watchers of media content, the emergence of social media has created a nation of media content creators. 

The key to making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say about you, analyzing the data and, finally, reaching social media business intelligence; using all these insights to know your customers better and improve your marketing strategy. 

However, managing and monitoring every platform directly with the basic tools provided by each major platform can be daunting and time consuming. For many businesses, it has become crucial to track the effectiveness of social media marketing, both in real time and at regular business cycles. The explosion of social media has led to growing and bustling market for Social Media Monitoring. There are hundreds of options for SMM tools out there; the space is cluttered and confusing for professionals investing in the software.

So the question arise which is the best social media monitoring tool? It depends.

Below a brief list of tools that are certainly among the most popular and capable social media monitoring (SMM) tools that offer good functionality or do one thing exceptionally well.

Take a look at : Using Social Media to Find Guest Post Opportunities

A tool that monitors social campaigns

• Wildfire’s social media monitor

Tool that monitors upcoming events

• Plancast

A tool that monitors with alert

• Google alert
• BackType alerts
• Yahoo pipes

Tool that monitors comments & forums

• Comment snipper
• Board reader
• Google trends

 Tool that monitors with social search

• Guzzle
• Social Seek
• BuzzFeed

Tool that monitors webpage changes

• WatchThatPage

Tool that monitors Social Networks & Blogs

• SocialMention
• Google Reader
• AllTop

A tool that monitors Twitter & Facebook

• Seesmic
• Hootsuite
• Twitter Advance Search
• Facebook Search

Below are brief descriptions about some popular tools

HootSuite : Lets you track your brand growth, visualize social demographics so you can see who’s engaging with you, and track sentiment metrics as well as engagement data.

Buffer App : Buffer is designed to help you operate multiple social media accounts simultaneously, schedule content, and allow collaboration with team members.

Pocket : Pocket lets you “put things in your pocket” from the web so you can access them again later. They’re stored on your device so you don’t need an Internet connection and its Twitter compatible.

TweetReach : is there to tell you how far your tweet went and who’s talking about it. It tells you how many people saw your tweet, and who those people were. 

Wolfram Alpha Facebook Report : is an analytics engine that offers detailed analysis of your Facebook activity. Wolfram Alpha will provide information you might not be interested in, such as where your northernmost Facebook contact is located, and tells you how many friends your friends have. It also monitors global reach, and tells you what gets discussed most across your network.

Now the most imperative question arise is what factor affects the selection of SMM tools?

1. Interface
2. Metrics it offers
3. Integration with different social networks
4. Price

Sometimes it just happens that we are not satisfied with any such updation on Brand and we post comments. Social Media monitoring is a powerful tool that can help your brand avoid an image crisis, which can occur in social media. With various tools you can gain new insights about your company, customers and competitors by tapping into more than 300 million social media conversations.

Brand Monitoring Monitor and analyze the presence of your brand on the Internet - wherever it is talked about and whoever talks about it. It measures the buzz around your brand, product or keyword. It gives you access to the current and archival mentions about chosen brands and products. You can find out who is talking about your company. Moreover, you know this just minute after it was published. This gives you a chance to act at once, so you can successfully build a meaningful relationship with the users who mention your brand’s name. As a result, in many situations you will be able to sort out the problem directly and prevent a tidal wave of negative comments and opinions.

This knowledge is crucial and lets you identify the exact users, their reach and preferred activities in social media. Moreover, such a quick and professional reaction can win you new fans and, of course, customers.

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Using Social Media to Find Guest Post Opportunities

Social media consists of a number of platforms where you may make contact with a lot of different people. The way you make contact will vary from platform to platform. For example, with Twitter there are people that can see your micro blogging (your tweets), whereas with YouTube they see your videos and may communicate back via the comments. Here is how you use social media to find guest post opportunities.

Remember that social media is a place where people communicate

If you were at a party and started to network, then there is a chance that you would have some interesting conversations that would lead to various opportunities. If you keep this sort of attitude about you when you are on social media then you may see similar opportunities. Do not resign yourself to the idea that you are just hunting for blogs to post on. There may be a website being set up as a directory for guest posting blogs and people may be interested in gaining supporters. Or, there may be a writing circle you can join that have a network of their own blog posts.

Search out the profiles of people with blogs

This is as difficult as it is easy. It is difficult because where in the name of Greek Argos do you start looking. You cannot exactly type in the word blog to see what happens (though you could try it). Getting started is difficult, but on the other hand it is easy because a massive amount of bloggers spend a lot of time promoting their blogs on social media. It is almost as if there is a space in the middle, where you want to find blogs, and bloggers want to find you, it is just about finding places where these two forces meet (and frankly social media is as good of a place as any).

Look at blog lists to find social media widgets and see where they lead

If you are having problems finding blogs then use the blog search tool that Google has. It shows you all the places where you can find a blog that relates to your Google search. It is good because it specifically leaves out thing such as Wikipedia and eCommerce websites.

On other peoples blogs you are going to find attempts to link social media and their blog. It may be done with links to their social media profiles, but it most often done with widgets of different varieties. Follow these widgets and you will find their social media profiles. On their social media profiles you may start to engage with them a little. You can talk about their blog and stroke their ego a little. Once you have buttered them up a little, you can start to suggest over social media that maybe you could guest post for them.

The blog search tool is the best way of doing this sort of thing because you can search for blogs that are similar to your own. Getting links from websites that have the same target audience as you is a good idea because it makes your blog more search engine friendly. It even makes their blog a little more search engine friendly because Google takes outgoing links into consideration these days.

Comment and engage with people on their social media profiles

You can bounce around the social media networks and start commenting on peoples social media profiles. You can ask people about guest posting opportunities and you can cuddle up to people that have blogs and see if you can convince them to let you guest post. You can be all sweet a lovely to them and explain how you may both help each other reach the top of the Google search engine results pages.

Ask other people where the best guest posts are

This is not as nutty as it sounds, even if you are just casting questions into the online social media atmosphere. For example, if you ask questions with your tweets on Twitter, then there are always a handful of people that are willing to throw a few answers at you. If you are lucky then people will tell you where directories exist that contain blogs willing to allow guest posts.

You can do the same on Facebook and Google+. You can even try a few bookmaking sites to see if any good blogs have been bookmarked that also allow guest posters to upload. If you play around on social media for long enough you are bound to come across some useful information without having to try too hard.

Author Bio

Kiara is an expert in essay writing, who would like to inform society on all SEO and marketing-related news. Today Kiara is eager to share her experience of work in the sphere of social media.

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