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Being on social media sites can benefit a business in many ways, from instant feedback and the ability to act quickly to customer queries, to increasing your online presence and helping to shape your brand.
If you don’t have any social media accounts, why on earth not? One of two things usually happen when someone fails to find a company on Twitter or Facebook. The company gives the impression that it’s too good for this form of communication, (which may put off the person currently searching for you), or the searcher thinks that the business doesn’t understand social media – which in this day and age is not the kind of impression you want to give potential customers, especially in the IT and tech industry.
For a number of companies out there it is not about either of these two scenarios. Many can feel that they don’t have time to do it justice. But whatever the reason, they could be missing out on potential customers.
Whether you’re a social media-phobe that doesn’t quite understand how it all works, a bustling business that thinks it doesn’t have the time to keep on top of it all, or a brand new start-up that’s looking for the simplest way to find new customers, here are ten of the best social media management apps to help you save time and increase your presence on the web:
– Integrates with over 25 social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Sina Weibo and more
– Schedule tweets, statuses and posts
– Quickly respond to common questions or customer requests with archived responses
– Bulk upload social messages – post hundreds of message to your networks in a single click
– Target your posts and share content with your customers based on location, language and demographic
– Track your brand growth
– Real-time spikes in brand sentiment
– Identify social influencers
– Grown followers and generate leads with campaigns
– Pricing: Free, Pro (£6.99/month), Enterprise (Price upon request)
– Organise and build custom timelines
– Keep track of lists, searches, activity and more
– Create searches to track topics, events and hashtags
– Refine search results with filters
– Share Twitter accounts with your team without sharing your password
– Build and export customer timelines to put on your website
– Real-time timeline updates
– Pricing: Free
– Works with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS feeds, blogs, Plurk and App.net
– Schedule tweets, status updates and posts
– Track keywords
– Save and resue drafts
– did.bz URL shortening
– Purge your Twitter tweets and start over
– Follow back and auto-DM features
– Submit social updates via email
– Schedule and publish blog posts and pages
– Pricing: Free, Twitter Unlimited ($6.97/month) or Professional ($17.97/month)
– Manage all your social media accounts by brand, location and talent
– Plan your content all in one place with a range of filters and permissions
– Workflows, configurable views, routing, SLA tracking, alerts and team assignments
– Search the social web for relevant topics and predict their future relevance
– Look back in time to see what has worked in previous campaigns
– Connect to your existing CRM, analytics and owned web properties
– Customer Success team on-hand to help with any issues or advice
– Pricing on request
– Share content across multiple social networks with one click
– Drive more clicks and traffic to your posts and website
– Increase fan engagement
– Schedule 2,000 posts per profile
– RSS feed integration
– Rich analytics for your posts
– Pricing: Small Business ($50/month), Medium Business ($100/month) or Large Business/Agency ($250)
– Smart Inbox brings all your messages from all your profiles into a single stream
– Set up keywords related to your brand
– View full Twitter conversation histories
– Zendesk, UserVoice and Salesforce integrations
– Draft, schedule, queue and post messages to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn
– Shorten links, attach photos and target specific audiences
– View scheduled content across your team
– Dig into profile and post-level insights as well as trends across messages and team responsiveness
– Live activity updates prevent your team from replying to the same message twice
– Keep full control of your social profiles by granting precise profile, publishing and reporting permissions to each user without sharing company passwords
– Pricing: Deluxe ($59 per user/month), Premium ($99 per user/month) or Team ($500 for 3 users/month)
– Create your own Facebook ads with targeting tools and analytics
– Facebook business page customiser
– Collect leads on social media with custom tabs and contests
– Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn post scheduler
– Easily market your sales, events and contests with Post Designer
– Twitter header templates
– iOS app for posting and scheduling on the go
– Pricing: Basic ($6.25/month), Pro ($13.25/month) or Agency ($33.25/month)
– Supports Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+
– Real-time data
– Sequence the distribution of your content
– Connect directly with your content management system and export to XML, RSS, WordPress Plug-In and Drupal
– Automated link shortening and web analytics tagging
– Generate addition revenue from existing social content by selling sponsorship of high-performing tweets and Facebook posts
– Pricing on request
– Get real-time data on your key performance metrics
– View graphs and tablets and export them to CSV to drop raw data in your own customer report
– Schedule unlimited tweets
– Recommendations for the best time to tweet and post
– Audience insights suggest who you should engage with and how to improve content
– Give each team member different permission and access levels
– Weekly performance summary
– Pricing: Bronze ($9/month), Silver ($49/month), Gold ($119/month), Custom (contact for pricing)
– Pull together relevant multimedia content from YouTube, Instgram, Flickr and RSS feeds and publish across all your social media platforms
– Customise your content to suit the audience of each social media platform before you cross-post
– Create groups of social media networks and manage roles and permission levels between team members
– Schedule and publish posts
– Build reports with specific social networks
– Pricing: Personal (Free), Pro ($9.99/month), Plus ($49.99/month), Advanced ($99.99/month) or Teams ($199.99)
More apps for businesses:
– Top 10 ways to build your own business app
– Top 10 recruitment apps for businesses of all sizes
Image source: Shutterstock
