Number of social media users worldwide (in billions)
If you’ve been watching the trends in 2020, you’ve probably heard that social media is the new television and the new word of mouth. Social media has become one of the top marketing tools in this internet[4] age. It’s only wise for online businesses to create social media accounts across social platforms and be active in each one of them. A brand’s social presence has everything to do with its sales and growth.
Connecting with your target audience has been the ultimate purpose of social media campaigns. You need to create content that speaks to your followers and help them through social posts that you send out on a regular basis. Brand awareness happens through social media when interaction with people and engagement rises in each social campaign.
It’s a fact that creating social posts takes time. You need to do your due research about your audience, much more the other tasks involved. Like publishing them across different platforms, monitoring their progress, turning them into social campaigns, tracking how each effort performs, analyzing your data so you can tell which ones actually result into sales, and connecting the dots so you can finally conclude which campaigns are successful and so, you can do more of what works. Do you mind performing all these tasks?
This is where social media management platforms come to the rescue. They’re also called as social media scheduling tools, social media tools for business or, social media management and marketing platform. Through these software technologies, social media managers can manage social media accounts across various social channels in one control center. No more logging in and logging out to each social profile every time you want to post a message, a tweet, a photo or a video. There’s only one account to manage them all. What a treat!
You may be asking, with a number of social media management software tools available today, should you just stick to what’s popular? What if they’re not delivering everything that you want to do for your e-commerce business? Considering how difficult, distracting and confusing it is, to keep multi-tasking trying to put in place all the gears of your e-commerce business. And yes, each component is important to be able to run and grow your brand. It’s important to keep these things in mind, when choosing which social media management system to use.
To help you make a wise choice, here’s a comparison of three great platforms for your social media management. Time is money and you need to know which social media tool is worth spending. Finding a platform that specializes in social media posting, social campaign creation and design, campaign monitoring, enterprise access control, social media feedback tracking and revenue tracking, are important factors to count for your brand’s success. It’s a big plus for businesses if there can be a single tool that will excellently perform all these time-consuming tasks. Let’s find out from the top providers below.
Being able to sit down once a week, organize and schedule all your social media postings for that week and longer, is a great time-saver. Advance scheduling of messages across different social media networks is the top most feature of social media platforms that most people love. After messages have been scheduled, they automatically post to social media at a specific time set by the user. You can schedule as many messages as you like. You can also choose to post your messages at an optimal time, which means that your platform will choose the best time to post your message for different social networks. 
Scheduling a post in Hootsuite can be done from its dashboard and Hootlet, an extension built for the Chrome browser. You can manually schedule or auto schedule posts. Tweets can be autoscheduled in bulk, as much as 350 tweets, by using its Pro plans. By choosing this feature, Hootsuite schedules posts according to an optimal time based on the average of all your social accounts.
With Buffer, you can set a daily posting schedule. You can specify a fixed set of days and times when your tweets will be posted. For example, you can customize it from Mondays through Fridays, and set Saturdays and Sundays differently if you want to. Buffer also has a Chrome extension that allows users to turn a webpage into a tweet. If a text is highlighted, its Chrome extension includes the highlighted text in the tweet. In addition, a right-click on any image on the web enables you to “Buffer this Image” and instantly tweet it.
Whether you opt to publish your post now or schedule it at another day and time, you’re free to do so at Sociamonials. Like Hootsuite, you can also choose to create posts in advance and schedule it for automatic posting. You can do this to as many posts as you like, and fill-up the year’s calendar if you choose to. But Sociamonials kicked it up a notch with its advance scheduling. It learns the behavior of your audience and gives you two options for optimal sending. You can send at an optimal time per network or at an optimal time on average. The first one customizes your sending time according to how your followers respond on each of the social networks. The second one customizes your sending time based on the overall behavior of your followers for all of your social networks.
Through this high level of customization to publish posts in Sociamonials, you can choose to schedule posts based on highest clickthroughs, lead conversion or revenue on a per-network basis. These are all important factors to sales conversion, that every business must keep an eye on because behavior is very different on each network.
Sociamonials also provides reporting of social posts. You’ll be able to track whether your postings are successful or not, through the verification report that comes with each post. You’ll also receive links to the live post. If a message has an issue, the user will be notified via email[5] with tips to resolve that issue.
Post preview is also available in Sociamonials. You can see exactly how your post will look in each social channel. By seeing their previews, you can know if the post is good for public viewing or not. If not, you can make edits on the previewer for each network separately, and also customize the call-to-action that are more relevant to each network.
Why It’s Important:A good customer experience[1] is what businesses aim for. Not only will it help spread a good word about you but also, conversations with customers are being picked up in social media for others to see. People feel good when they’re appreciated by those they do business with. They’re usually more than willing to give positive comments when asked to. Acknowledging and rewarding them is the best way to get more repeat business and long-term success. Through Social CRM, real-time data exchanges become available and every business can tap it to improve customer[6] relationships for more meaningful and personal interactions, which ultimately drive sales. The Social CRM feature allows you to identify the influencers in your network and enable you to reach out to them. Customer engagement[2] has definitely overthrown the old fashion sales pitch.
Unfortunately, Hootsuite doesn’t include this feature.
Unfortunately, Buffer doesn’t include this feature.
Looks like Sociamonials wins this category. Of the three social media platforms, it’s the only one with a Social CRM feature.
With Sociamonials’ Social CRM, participants from all of your campaign submissions and share button users will automatically be added as a contact in its database. From there, you can have a full view of the activity profile of each contact. You can monitor their actions to determine the next good move for your business.
You’d be able to see their purchases, white paper downloads, referral activity and engagement with each of your social posts. You’d be able to tell specifically who referred you so you can thank that particular contact. And reference that contact if you start reaching out to the newly referred prospect. You can also view a snapshot of their social connections, advocacy ranking and referral ranking. With one click, you can check their social pages. One amazing feature that drives sales is, you’re able to assign these contacts to sales team members and add internal comments on their profile page. Now you can never go wrong with your sales strategy.
Why It’s Important:Social campaigns are a great strategy to increase brand awareness, improve brand engagement, get feedback from users, build your email list, increase website traffic and many more benefits for your e-commerce business. Social campaigns are focused social media efforts executed in a specific period of time and aimed towards a business goal. Some aspects of social campaigns that are critical to its success are the targeting, tracking and analytics used to be able to customize social media efforts to its target audience and then determine which particular campaigns drive engagement and sales. Running social campaigns is different from managing social media profiles.
Hootsuite has a companion platform for social media contests and campaigns which it calls “Contests.” It allows you to build sweepstakes, contests and quizzes across multiple social networks. It offers 16 different contest types, which are available in three types of pricing plans for business and, customized plans for enterprise. Hootsuite’s Contests are designed to be hosted on Facebook[7], microsites or on your own website, and are optimized for the web and mobile.
Buffer has a totally different focus. It’s a social media management platform that’s solid on managing social accounts across many social networks. It doesn’t offer a platform for social campaigns.
Sociamonials has a great platform for social campaigns that also offers a wide-range of customization, moderation, scalability, tracking and retargeting. It provides users with 16 campaign types that you can just point and click to drive loyalty, engagement and referrals from your online community.
It comes with a WYSIWYG editor that allows customizing of campaign designs and, a number of agency-quality design templates and background images. You can set-up AdRoll retargeting campaigns to encourage visitors to come back and submit, if they don’t complete the form submission process. Although Sociamonials provides you with a platform to directly create emails to your audience, it also lets you synchronize with your email marketing[3] software provider, if you already have one. Through its many integrations, form submission can be automatically added to your email provider. There’s no extra step on your part.
Its Contests and Sweepstakes has a fraud prevention mechanism that flags suspicious entries. Your Contests and Sweepstakes promotions can be a breeze as Sociamonials takes care all aspects of selection of winner and awarding of additional entries for various referrals and actions. Detailed information about each contestant including history of activity and identification, are also provided by the Sweepstakes console. It’s also capable of handling video and text testimonials. You can take advantage of Sociamonials streaming video recorder to make things easier.
Each social media management suite has its own areas of specialization. But to rise above your competition, you’ve got to be practical. If you really want to save time in 2020 and still have a keen eye on the direction of your social media efforts, choose a platform that manages the creation, management, and tracking of your social media posts and campaigns. Your social media management tool should also allow you to connect all your social media efforts altogether so you can see which efforts are producing the result that you want. And so, you can see from a glance who are the top influencers among your connections.
Other social media platforms may provide you with analytics for individual measures but you wouldn’t know which one is effective as a collective effort. With Sociamonials, you can connect the dots, you can get insights which posts lead you to a sale, which social campaigns attributes to revenue. Isn’t it the goal of your e-commerce business? Choose wisely, choose what’s best for your business.
Test it out. Take advantage of Sociamonials complete social media tools and advanced marketing platform to build and grow your online business. Sign-up for a free trial at www.sociamonials.com.
English 
Español 
Français