How Social Media Management Software Can Help Your Business Thrive

Social media is initially intended to build online communities; that is, for people to connect with each other in a different way – in a digital, “virtual” platform. The platform allows its users to share information about themselves – their location, affiliations and interests where the system base its network recommendations. The network it suggests you to build includes people or other accounts you could connect into, regardless of their location in the world, because he or she has something similar to what you do. As the years went by, and many updates and accounts created later, it basically built a massive network of people, interconnected by many different things.

How Social Media Affects Businesses?

The social media now have a massive following, which are practically consumers themselves too. The social aspect of sharing information has now become a source of insight for businesses to know more about their target customers – what they want, and how they want to have it. Product recommendations through “digital word-of-mouth” advertising is all part of the social media and of its users’ lives, which gave rise to opportunities for marketing that businesses, together with social media management tools, are now taking advantage.

How social media marketing helps businesses? Doing it is taking one step nearer your target audience. It is a consumer-level marketing, wherein you basically open your company’s “life” to its customers, letting them approach and ask anything directly to you, and connect with you in a more personal way. Just like with people who create social media accounts and openly share those simple, daily on-goings on their lives, businesses can use this “peer level” marketing to keep their customers updated with their newest offerings. It is one way to build your business’ online presence, which is then, associated with SEO and websites, which is another type of digital marketing strategy.

SMM + CM + EM + SEM = Digital Marketing Explosion

Social media marketing, or SMM, is actually one of the newer types of internet marketing. Marketers, and its developers themselves saw a huge potential for more profits by incorporating the use of social behavior in analyzing trends, improving customer service, and capturing traffic that converts to high-value customers. Social media is now a diverse platform for marketing activities, which apart from being free-to-use for all, more aggressive marketers can also take advantage of its paid advertisement features.

But, social media marketing cannot stand on its own. To maximize its benefits, you must integrate it with other digital marketing campaigns. Its social sharing feature can effectively enhance content marketing, or CM. This makes use of informative, targeted, engaging content that is relevant to the product or service a business is offering, and have it “shared” or promoted using the social media. This way, your business can give more value to your products and services by spreading awareness and accurate information, create more informed customers.

Social media marketing can also effectively enhance email marketing. Since in social media you need an to open an account, you can take advantage of all your social media account followers and subscribers’ email information and help feed your email marketing database. This also works both ways, where you can also use your email marketing campaign to promote your social media accounts.

Lastly, SMM can also effectively SEO, which is part of search engine marketing, or SEM. Search engines today already recognize social media accounts as important ranking factors for web sites. Your business’ popularity in social media can help search engines assess your value and relevance in the industry you are operating in, thus returning you with a higher page rank. It also makes use of your online reviews, which can be also found through your social media accounts, to help users know more about your business. The diverse functionalities of social media networks allow search engines to analyze your business better, and to index more information about you for more accurate search results.

Tips to Maximize Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

Regardless of the size of your business, social media marketing is a vital part of any marketing strategy. Consumers are now seeing social media sites as credible sources of honest feedbacks about companies, products and services. For a business, the social media can also serve as their customer support center, where two-way communication can happen between them and their customers. This personal approach strengthens B2C relationships, which are essential for long-term partnership and brand loyalty.

According to the Global Digital Statshot: August 2015, a digital, social and mobile usage statistics from Wearesocial.com,  30 percent of the world’s population are now social media users. If you won’t use social media for marketing, you are missing out that 2.206 billion potential customers.

Now that there are a lot of social media channels that a business can utilize, it can be overwhelming and challenging at the same time, to choose which ones will be more appropriate for your needs. With so many activities involved in a day of a social media manager, it could be more tedious if you will manage multiple accounts at once. Here are some tips on how social media marketing is done to maximize the use of social media for your marketing campaigns:

1. Adopt a manageable strategy

Planning is the key. Before adopting a social media channel to use, identify first your objectives. Who are your intended audience? What is your brand’s theme? Are you having a one-man or a staffed social media marketing team? What is your purpose, is it social media marketing to increase sales, or to improve your brand?

Answering these questions will lead you into knowing your required level of commitment for your social media marketing campaigns. It will also help you determine if you need additional tools, or you what social media platform you can focus on. If you are a small business owner, you can have simpler methods of promoting your business by starting with your own network. A social media marketing campaign need not to be grandiose right away, and should stay manageable to maximize its benefits.

2. Track and measure your campaign performance

You won’t know the success of your efforts if you don’t measure your campaign’s performance. Analytic tools, which mostly integrate with most social media management tools, allow you to capture your customers’ data from your social media accounts, analyze it, and return reports. These reports are sources of valuable insight about your customers’ behavior and the effectiveness of your campaigns. Number of followers, likes, mentions, click-through rates are just some of the metrics you can use to accurately measure the performance of your social media marketing campaign.

3. Use the social media as one of your customer support channels

Supporting two-way communication is one of the most valuable feature of social media marketing. This way, you can effectively and efficiently respond to your customers’ queries, and allow them to express their concerns to you on a more personal level of approach. Customers can also participate in the development and innovation of products and services that will benefit them the most. Online reviews, especially the positive ones, can help your business appear more credible and trustworthy too.

4. Take advantage of free or paid tools

What are social media marketing tools? Social media marketing is diverse when it comes to a lot of things. It can cater to a variety of marketing objectives, and you can also extend its features depending on your investment.

There are a number of free social media marketing and management tools available online which you can take advantage, which offers the basic features you need. You can monitor multiple campaigns, automate postings, and analyze your data using these tools. This way, you can be more efficient, with the help of technology.

Must-have Features of Software to Look for

Smart decision making should accompany you at all times, especially when investing in tools or software for your business. In 2015, it was reported by the State of Business from the Altimeter Group, that 38 percent of businesses are planning to allocate more than 20 percent of its advertising resources for social media marketing alone, which is up by 13 percent from how it was the previous year. When it comes to social media marketing, these are the essential features that your software or tool must have:

1. Analytics

Metrics can help you analyze rooms for improvement, profit-yielding strategies and potential for innovation. Your social media management software should be able to give you useful reports about your campaign performance, to help you allocate your time, energy and resources to the ones that work for your business.

2. Monitoring

Monitoring allows you to have a wider perspective about all the marketing channels that you use for your social media marketing campaigns. It helps you compare, side by side, each of their performances, so you will know what returns the right outcome based on your objectives.

3. Integration

How social media benefits marketing? As mentioned, social media marketing plays a significant role in supporting other digital marketing campaigns. And to do this, it must be able to effectively integrate with their systems. Check compatibilities, among your existing digital marketing software to make sure that you can have a streamlined workflow and more efficient outcomes.

4. Location services

It helps to create a more targeted marketing approach when you know where your customers are. Location (geographical) can help you understand the underlying cultures that may support their engagement. On the other hand, local location services can help engage your customers better by sending localized search information such as maps. Location services can also help you locate and target potential customers that are within the area, so you can have stronger conversions.

5. Collaboration

Collaboration features can help your social media marketing staff to streamline their tasks and centralize data to avoid inaccuracies, errors and redundancy. It can also make them to be more productive, and you can also monitor the progress of their tasks. Collaboration will ensure that workflows are seamless, and you can respond to problems right away.

6. Scheduling

Automating post schedules can help you save more time and also allow you to send it out on a timely manner. It can also assist you with curating content to share from other sources, and strike a balance in your posts in terms of volume and schedule.

7. Content management

Social media marketing is not just all about interactions. To sustain the interest of your customers, you must supply them with fresh content that stays relevant to your products and services, as well as to their needs. Your social media marketing tool should have a content management tool, which allows you to create and post content yourself, or to find relevant articles which you can share with your customers.

Social media is an indispensable tool for any type of business nowadays. And with the use of the best social media management tool, you can be more efficient in executing the activities revolving around it and at the same time, you maximize its benefits for your business to thrive in the tightening market competition.

Let the social media management tool reviews from CrowdReviews.com help you with your quest to find the right tool that will support your social media marketing endeavors.