By Ryan Bersitallat


For any company that intends to build a reputation and brand on the networks, social media marketing tools are not an optional choice any longer. Just opening accounts on the networks and allocating a staffer to engage in conversation and put out messages is simply not enough any more. What it requires is a professional approach, with the right methods and the right tool(s).

Just like there's an unprecedented boom in the number of consumers who can be reached via the networks, there's also a boom in the tools available. There are web and desktop based tools for integrating all the networks into one panel and a single login, so that one message can go out to all the networks. Others simply monitor and track all the accounts across all networks.

There are free ones and ones that are designed for the enterprise level customer. Others have built in systems for tracking responses and measuring metrics for analysis and ROI. Some are platform specific, and some even offer multi-language support.

Which one to use depends on many factors, such as how big the company is, and what kind of social media budget they have, plus the size of the team. For instance, enterprise customers with a strong team may need something equally flexible and advanced such as Spredfast. This SMMS (social media management system) has a dashboard with a single login for managing all the networks.

A message just has to be typed out once, and Spredfast will customize it for each network before sending it out. This ensures a bit of a distinct personality for the company on each of the networks, while team members don't have to go about replicating the work. It helps that this tool is capable of measuring metrics and providing an overall ROI for the entire team's efforts for all networks combined. Hootsuite is another choice that can fulfill most of these functions, but without the bells and whistles.

For individuals, TweetDeck is a very useful tool that helps one person manage multiple accounts. CoTweet goes in the opposite direction, and is handy if multiple team members are posting on the same account. It can track each person's activity separately.

Choices side, social media marketing tools are absolutely essential for those who don't wish to let the growing volume of friends and followers drown out individual relationships. Use a tool, and it becomes possible to filter out the noise while responding to mentions, send messages to all networks with very little effort and gather response data. Company and brand names and keywords can be tracked separately and responded to in a timely fashion. The bottomline is that there is nothing optional about using a tool for social media, at least not for those who want to see continued growth on the networks.




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