5 Essential Social Media Tools for Every Business

As social media grows strong, so too does the complexity of being able to effectively monitor and manage what people are talking about you and to keep a track on everything. Now a days it is very easy to get confused regarding the social media tools and opportunities available for small businesses across the Web. Every day, it seems, a new idea, product, opportunity comes along that is the new “must have, must use” tool. As a result an entire industry in social media monitoring software has surfaced alongside the huge social media marketing industry. Here we present you some of popular and useful social media monitoring tools...

1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management system for brand management created by Ryan Holmes in 2008. The user interface is clean and takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, MySpace, WordPress, TrendSpottr and Mixi. Additional integrations are available via Hootsuite’s App Directory, including Instagram, MailChimp, Reddit, Storify, Tumblr, Vimeo and YouTube.

Hootsuite allows you to give team members access to you or your client’s social media accounts instead of having to give them the passwords to the accounts themselves. This is powerful in case a team member leaves the company, you can revoke access to all of the accounts at once by simply removing them from the Hootsuite team. And since they only have access to account management via Hootsuite dashboard, this also protects you from account theft.

Features
•    Manage multiple social media accounts in one dashboard
•    Get new content to publish easily
•    Schedule posts, tweets and messages
•    Track brand mentions
•    Analyse social media traffic
•    Plans and Pricing: It is free for individual use with upto three social media profiles. Pro accounts start at $8.99 a month and allow 50 social media profiles. Enterprise accounts are offered for large organisations.

2. Mention

It is a real-time social media monitoring tool that monitors large number of social sources in more than 40 different languages, ensuring that you never published anything on the web or a mention of your brand. Build your team, share your alerts, and assign tasks to the right person for the job. It allows you to generate reports and export data to compare yourself with your competitors.

Features
•    Get alerted in real-time via push notifications
•    Allow multiple people to manage your profiles with the team feature
•    Retweet a mention, Like or share mentions directly on your Facebook page, send mentions via email, or to your Buffer account for later posting.
•    Analyze your statistics and export your data
•    Plans and Pricing: Starters plan for 3 users and 3 alerts starts at €29/month and tracks upto 3000 mentions. Premium accounts start at €99/month for 5 users, 5 alerts, 10,000 mentions and €299/month for 10 users, 10 alerts and 50,000 mentions. Enterprise plan is available at $799/month for 30 users, 30 alerts and 500,000 mentions.

3. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is an another social monitoring tool with a focus on Twitter. With this tool you can identify your followers, their geographical location and their tweet timing. This tool lets you find related Twitter accounts, track followers, compare users and search within your social graph.

Features
•    Search Twitter bios to connect with anyone
•    Compare Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers
•    Get graphs of account activity and Easily share your reports with the world.
•    Manage multiple Twitter accounts in one service
•    Sort followers based on different criteria
•    Plans and Pricing: A basic limited version of the service is offered free of charge. In order to access the full features you must be a Moz subscriber. The standard Moz tier account starts at $99 per month, and the next tier up is available at $149 per month. The primary difference between tiers is the number of campaigns that users can run per account.

4. Buffer

Buffer is a tool designed to manage social networks, by providing the means for a user to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Its best feature is its scheduling which allows you to pre-post content to go out at specific times of the day whether you’re around or not. It also allows to build up a queue of content to share with your friends and followers, and keep an track on your posts with Buffer’s analytics to see which posts performed best. The Buffer application is compatible with three different platforms 1)Browser: Allows the application to work as downloaded extensions for three browsers, Google Chrome, Safari and Mozilla Firefox. 2)Mobile: allows the application to be installed on iOS systems and Android phones. 3)Newsreader: allows the application to be integrated with various newsreader applications, such as Flipboard and Zite, Taptu, TweetDeck, Evernote, Pocket, Instapaper etc.

Features
•    Queue posts and schedule posting time
•    Team collaboration, detailed analytics
•    Manage up to ten accounts at once
•    Multiple Device and App compatibility
•    Plans and Pricing: The free version of the application allows a maximum limit of 10 posts to be scheduled at any given time, and only allows the management of one social media account per social media website. The Awesome plan also allows an increased limit of 100 posts at any single time, and the option to manage 10 social account profiles and is priced at $10. This plan also inlcudes Feeds feature that adds an RSS feed to a user’s Buffer profile. Small business accounts start at $50 a month and support up to 25 accounts and 5 team members with access to rich analytics. Large business accounts are $250/month and support 150 accounts and 25 team members.

5. Topsy

Topsy is a social search and analytics tool that allows you to keep track of links, tweets, photos, videos and more. Since Twitter’s inception in 2006, Topsy has maintained a comprehensive index of tweets, numbering in hundreds of billions thus you can be confident that you will get a comprehensive overview whatever keyword it is that you are interested in.

Features
•    Search the social web by links, tweets, photos, videos or influencers
•    Users can group terms into saved topics and setup customized alerts and daily activity digests
•    Find the biggest influencers on social media with the Top 6K Rankings
•    Detailed analytics, including influence statistics, social trends and comparisons
•    Plans and Pricing: Topsy is a free service but pro accounts with enhanced analytics do exist.