Key Features to Look For in a Social Media Management Software

An effective social media management system must provide functionality in administering social media accounts. It must be able to schedule your posts and suggest relevant content. It should also have the ability to boost your posts.

A social media management software is used by communications and marketing departments to engage in online communities, manage workflows and increase brand awareness. With the help of social media management tools, they are able to create engaging content to be able to maintain an online presence, which can also be used for their marketing campaigns.

Tools such as archives, content libraries, timelines, schedules and user access control are most of the products to look for in selecting the top social media management software. These tools are aimed at customer satisfaction and conversion, increase inbound traffic and maximize search engine optimization. It also provides a social analytics software and social media monitoring. It can be a standalone, an integrated component or part of a social media suite. Social media management is a feature often offered by marketing automation products.

Below is a list of key features to look for to help you select the best social media management software for your business.

Monitoring capabilities

Native monitoring tools that integrate with a social media monitoring software can complement social media management tools. It’s like having several social media accounts across different platforms. This cross-channel monitoring feature allows simultaneous tracking from all of your accounts. This leads to increased efficiency and productivity. It will also improve your response time and notifications; and collects your data into a centralized place.

Social media ads amplify your community stories and brand. It allows you to reach customers by activity and social profile. This is also helpful in optimizing ad campaigns in real-time. Adding social sharing buttons to your content and campaigns will enable you to track who drives conversations and shares your content.

Integration

The best social media management software products are mostly determined by customer satisfaction. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can be incorporated with the social media management tools to collect data. This lets you see data about specific and overall customer behavior in social media. This will help you further understand what motivates customers and what it takes to improve their satisfaction rates.

An important CRM feature is the conversation history tool. This tool allows you to look at the conversation history of a user. This lets you know if a user is a potential customer or just someone who frequently trolls at your account. This feature enables you to prioritize those who require immediate attention.

Some businesses integrate their software with third-party customer service products for the improvement of their inquiry management and support system. Automated posts that are scheduled on your social accounts can be integrated with URL shortening services that can measure retweets, comments, replies and likes.

Filtering and Geo-Targeting

It is vital to analyze customers in terms of age, location and other demographics. This allows you to understand their motivations and needs. Recognizing your customer base will help you cater properly to them. You must select a product that filters results and data that depends on demographics.

Large businesses must be conscientious of social media updates that they share to a location. Geo-Targeting tools helps you avoid PR nightmares and misconstrued marketing campaigns. A post intended for a certain country may be misunderstood by others.

A message approval system allows you to craft and filter inappropriate messages. Messages will only be approved by someone with more authority. It’s difficult to recover from a negative social media update so it’s best to avoid getting in situations as such.

Reputation Management

Features such as analyzing your market presence and reputation on social media platforms are important tools to look for. Look for tools that allow employee tracking, brand competition monitoring and have notifications and alerts. Your selected software should monitor conversations and mentions on social media to enable customer interaction as well as respond to criticisms.

Social engagement apps, such as sweepstakes, referral programs and polls, help enhance the engagement of your audience to your landing pages, Facebook pages, emails and other websites.

Social Analytics

It is important to uncover your customers’ sentiments, and identify the trends that would help accommodate your customers better. Once your social media management tool is implemented, you will be receiving a huge amount of data that is subject to analysis. Your product should integrate with a social analytics software. This will analyze and collect data such as handling times, social media presence statistics, customer demographics, incident response and satisfaction scores.

You may also want to consider that it has the ability to organize your data in a visual report. Access to various types of data will help you accurately analyze the effectivity of your social media strategy. Reports will help aggregate data from real users thru reviews. It breaks down all market presence factors and satisfaction metrics that influences social media management market trends. Actual users’ insights help find the software with the highest customer satisfaction and best features.

Publishing

The key to increase engagement and drive new followers is sharing smart and relevant content across social media. To establish your brand, publishing capabilities must be considered. Message scheduling tools are great for planning weeks, or even months-worth of content in one sitting. Find a tool that would visualize your entire calendar at once. This will allow you to make sure that your content is unique and continuous.

A queuing tool lets you load up on content that will only share posts whenever you are already lacking in content. This will be automatically published at a later time. A post-time optimization tool shares your content at a time that best fits your unique audience. This tool allows content when your targeted audience is actually online.

Listening and Engagement

A social media inbox is an important tool to make sure that you are responding to all messages in a prompt manner. Once you have responded to a message, an inbox message completion tool would immediately erase it from your inbox. This tool ensures that you are not responding to messages twice.

Social media monitoring is a tool that lets you find conversations related to your brand even if you are not directly mentioned. This tool navigates you to conversations where you’re mentioned so you would know whether they are discussing about your brand positively or negatively.

 Collaboration

Large social media teams need collaborative tools with functionalities that would enable their human resources, sales and customer service to work together fluidly. You need a tasking tool that enables you to assign a social media message to a specific team that is equipped to answer such questions. There are even tools that are able to monitor and follow-up if a task is already completed.

Collision detection tools help you avoid missed social media messages and double-responding. It shows you when someone has already responded to a message. Account permission tools lets you delegate permissions to specific users. Not everyone in your team has the same level of authority. This is a security feature that makes sure nobody has access to certain functionalities not intended for them.

Mobile Features

It is true that social media never sleeps, but it is impossible for someone to sit in front of a computer all day. Having a tool that allows you to bring your social presence wherever you are should be highly considered.

Your tool should have almost all of the same features as your desktop platform. You need a mobile application that can stream your inbound messages so that you can still respond even if you’re on the move. Make sure that you enable your push notifications so that you can quickly respond to messages without having to constantly check your app all day.

Another relatively new idea in the world of social media marketing is the employee advocacy tool. The company encourages their employees to share their brand to their trusted connections to increase the reach of content.

Always remember that social network is the key. Most users want their product to be able to integrate with every social network there is. The overall success of businesses online greatly rely on social media management functionality such as social engagement, social campaigns and social sharing. Marketing on social media can be a tedious task especially for startup businesses. With the right social media management software and tools, it won’t be as difficult.

They say that consumers have a higher chance of using a local business if they have a social media site. It is important to have a social media management plan that will work for your business. Having an organized social network and a well-executed plan will save you both money and time. This will allow you to invest your time in other aspects of your business.

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