5 Tools Every Social Media Manager Should Know About

Managing a social media presence requires nothing short of a little touch of magic. Your clients will always want more; they depend on you to deliver results, nothing less.

In the social media management scene, you run into two different problems. For one, you have to manage your workflow in a way that allows you to cater to more projects. Secondly, your social media magic needs a little bit of pixie dust.

In essence, this pixie dust consists of tools and applications that help you keep organized while making you more aggressive and awesome at figuring out social media.

5 Star Social Media Tools

After working with and without customer relationship management (CRM) and social media management tools, I can tell you that you’re missing out on a lot if you feel like you can handle everything without them.

Sure, it’s another learning curve, and sometimes it can get a bit annoying to learn something new especially when you have a ton of work to do.

But each hour you put into learning to use one of these tools translates to several hours saved chasing after tasks and placing bets on what the next move should be on your social media presences.

Think of your whole operation like an engine: It takes time to grease up the squeaky bits, but doing so will make the engine run more smoothly and live longer.

As you bring more people on board and take on more tasks, you add more pistons, belts, and chains. Oiling it becomes mandatory at one point.

But here’s where social media management differs from running an engine: A piston is a piston is a piston. Each social media presence you manage however, is a completely new challenge on its own.

To manage one presence efficiently does not mean that you can apply the same rules to all of them. As a result, you’ll need as much assistance as you can get.

Let’s have a look at some of these tools.

A CRM – Social Network Thingamabob – Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a free enterprise social network that comes with more than 30 different collaboration tools.

You’ll appreciate the explosive opportunities this platform allows you to take advantage of with your clients or employer.

It works as a team application. The “activity stream” area highly resembles a Facebook news feed and allows seamless interaction between people you invite. Also like Facebook, Bitrix24 allows you to “like” comments and posts on the activity stream.

This will allow you to easily pull up any content that’s useful or popular when using the internal search engine.

Need to talk to someone privately? Bitrix24 has an internal instant messaging system that lets you talk on the fly. The workgroup feature allows you to separate each project into a distinct “area.”

This is useful for involving people only in the projects that concern them.

In addition to having a fun and interactive social network for your clique, time management tools will ensure that you and your team (if you have one) remain productive.

After the day’s done, you can see a report of all timed activity or simply let Bitrix24 send you reports on a scheduled basis (daily, monthly, or weekly).

A calendar also lets you collaboratively set due dates and meeting schedules.

Integrate With Insight – Insightly

If you’ve already got Gmail or Outlook, you’re in for a treat.

Insightly is a CRM that has a rudimentary-ish interface that lets you add up to 3 users for free, and its Mailchimp integration neatly interacts with your email accounts and other web applications to ensure you don’t feel overburdened by having “one more tool in the shed.”

Get Around Google+’s Nasty API – Do Share

Google+’s API has been a frustration for social media managers since the company started entering the social media game with a product that has the same proficiency as a senile giraffe.

The company shows no signs that it plans to do things any differently, so things like post scheduling and automatic posting remain impermissibly difficult.

Your cries have not gone unheard, however, since someone decided to develop a nifty little extension for Google Chrome that allows you to work with the stubborn social network and schedule posts.

Do Share works around the brick wall by logging you into Google+ through your browser and posting whatever you tell it to.

The only drawback is the fact that you have to keep the browser (and the extension) opened, at least until it posts whatever you want it to. This also means that you’ll have to change your power-on habits if you’re not used to keeping your PC on 24 hours a day.

Get The Gist of What People Are Saying – SocialMention

SocialMention is a little gem lets you search the entire blogosphere and social troposphere for anything.

It’s handy when you’re looking for popular opinion about a particular company. You’ll also get to sneak in on competitors, showing you where they’re present and what people are saying about them.

It searches through public repositories within several popular social networks, websites, and some less popular blogs. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Ask.Com, YouTube, and Delicious (yes, that network still exists).

Social Media-Fu Simplified – Crowdbooster

Facebook insights is cute. But if you really want a bird’s-eye view of your social media presences abroad, Crowdbooster will give you much more.

Its analytics platform comes tightly packed with tons of metrics that help you figure out just how engaged your followers are and offers recommendations each and every day on how to improve your followership.

It supports the two major social networks, namely Facebook and Twitter.

My Opinion

Even to the most weathered veterans, social media is a tough ocean to navigate. Anyone who’s been in this game long enough understands how fickle audiences can be and how difficult it is to adapt to these seemingly random changes.

Just keep your eyes on the ball and remember these two things: stay organized and never be afraid to enlist help from these trusted platforms.

If you need more, here’s a guide to 88 social media tools for you.

What About You?
What kinds of tools do you consider paramount to riding the waves through social media networks?

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About the Author
Miguel Leiva-Gomez covers enterprise technology solutions while playing an advisory role to struggling and aspiring businesses that wish to get their feet wet in difficult markets. His extensive experience with software and hardware has made him able to navigate the terrain of technology and bring it to a level that businesses can understand.