Social media is a powerful place where e-commerce brands can have a real impact on their audience and a measurable outcome for business growth. If you want to thrive in this information age, you have to make your social media campaign strategy work in tandem with your overall business strategy. Honestly, it’s not an easy job. Managing your social media presence can be a daunting task, especially when there’s so many social channels that you need to interact with. Even if you choose to be active only on the big social networks, there’s still so much to do to keep up with the competition and fast-paced communication with your followers. There’s only one solution to survive the social media mayhem, find the best social media management software tool that suits you.
In this article, we compare four big brands of social media management platforms based on three major usability features that we believe are important in social media management. When these features are delivered poorly, your audience-building efforts, e-commerce data analytics and business growth may be at stake.
Why It’s Important:Social media publishing platforms are valued most for their ability to manage and schedule social posts. With all the social accounts across different social media channels that you handle as a social media manager, it’s very time-consuming and overwhelming to confront everything that you’ve got to do on your monthly calendar. But if you take advantage of one of these social media management software tools, your job becomes quick and easy. You’ll have the option to focus on your content strategy and, on the content itself. You’ll be able to work on your social media marketing campaigns and figure out important details that contribute more to your e-commerce business growth.
For example, you can take a look at the type of content that your audience best responds to, find out the best date and time of the week to post a particular content type, and study which campaign strategy can bring out the most interaction with your online community. And the reason you’re able to do this is because the major parts of your social publishing are taken care of, like a checkbox ticked off in your checklist. Being able to make your social content organized, have control of your posting schedule and being able to see what’s working and what’s not with your social publishing activities, are the top functionalities critical to the social media success of any e-commerce brand.
With its visually appealing platform, you can perform all your social publishing tasks using Agora Pulse. You can use it to schedule your posts or directly publish to Facebook[2], Twitter, LinkedIn, Google[3]+ and Instagram[4]. You can also view your social content calendar, which is useful to quickly find out what’s going on with your social activities within a week or a month. Each of your linked social media account to Agora Pulse has its own dashboard where you can view a snapshot of stats and items to review from your social inbox. You can directly engage with your social community using its platform. It also shows your upcoming posts. It has a great organization for each of your social networks.
Social publishing is one of the key social media tasks that you can also do well with Sprout Social. With its publishing tool, you can easily switch social accounts to post to. You can also shorten links in your post, save your post as a draft if you’re not ready to publish and work on it later, and you can also schedule your post for future publishing through its Sprout Queue. You can choose to publish at an optimal time to make sure your followers will see your post. Sprout Social makes use of a centralized calendar where you can view a snapshot of all your social content, and, also filter what you want to see based on campaign tags, content types, networks and profiles.
Twitter itself created its own Tweet management tool for posting Tweets and tracking conversations, replies, hashtags, and other Tweet-related data. TweetDeck is a completely free app, and you can connect an unlimited number of accounts. You can also organize your Tweets and schedule it for future posting. You can set it up to notify you whenever you receive replies. TweetDeck lets you see real-time conversations in its platform. It’s useful in monitoring and managing your own Twitter account, and even multiple accounts.
Social media publishing is one of the main features of Sociamonials. Like most social media management tools, you can directly publish your posts or schedule it at a future date and time. You can also choose an optimal schedule based on highest clickthroughs, lead conversion or revenue on a per-network basis. Sociamonials is packed with more advanced features that make your social publishing smarter and easier. Its platform provides a preview that lets you see how a post appears on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. If needed, you can make edits to each network separately. This is useful when creating a call-to-action, which is done differently for each network.
The platform also allows you to save a social post as a draft if you’re unable to finish it. You can get back to it at a later time to publish or schedule for publishing. Sociamonials automatically archives all sent messages. It’s such a time saver, to be able to open one of these sent messages as a new post for reposting. Sometimes, you send out messages with incorrect links. No worries, you can correct these links even after they’re published, even if they’ve been retweeted and shared already. If you’re a company, you can route posts for approval automatically based on user role permissions. Depending on your Sociamonials account level, you can manage unlimited Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts via a single control center.
Why It’s Important:You may have noticed the marketing shift that’s already happening in businesses around the world today. Traditional marketing and sales are going away, an increasingly social and interactive strategies of getting new customers are here to stay. Social CRMs are at the top of the trend in customer[5] relationship management tools. This technology taps into real-time data exchange with your followers, prospects and customers. Social CRMs enable social media monitoring which makes use of available data and analytics about your customers, so you can engage with them in a more meaningful and personal way. It’s such a breakthrough technology that’s very useful in improving customer relationships for every business.
When your e-commerce brand or products receive mentions on social media channels, social CRMs can pick it up, so you can have a chance to join the conversation, wherever it is online. By tracking variables related to your customer behavior, you can provide them with a great customer experience[1] they’re likely to remember. When they give out a good word about your brand, you can acknowledge them in social media and issue rewards as a gesture of appreciation. Social CRMs help you evaluate how your customers perceive your business, and also how they engage and interact with the whole community. All these customer intelligence data are used for targeted conversations. This information is valuable on how your e-commerce business drive products and, strategize your marketing and sales.
Agora Pulse adds up a Social CRM tool with its social media software. It allows users to automatically split your followers into three key groups based on the stage of awareness of your brand. These are the engaged, ambassador and influencer. The tool helps you identify who are the right people to engage with, in your marketing campaigns. If you want to, you can segment your list further as you like. Moreover, you can also track recent interactions with your followers.
Sprout Social considers social media relationships seriously. Its social CRM platform has tools and support system that are helpful in managing customer relationships. It provides contextual information that guides its users to engage meaningful conversations with followers. It enables a team to manage social relationships. Based on sharing options available, you can have access to a complete customer profile and complete conversation history. It also supports integrations with helpdesk and other CRM management platforms.
TweetDeck specializes only in Twitter management, and doesn’t support social CRM.
Sociamonials’ social CRM integrates all of your social media activities so that you can tap into a real-time data that makes you smart in all of your social relationships. All of your campaign submissions and share button users will be displayed as a contact in the Social CRM database. You can quickly browse the full activity profile of each of your contact so you know what’s going on. You’ll be able to know their purchases, white paper downloads, referral activity and engagement activity. You’ll also get a snapshot of each of your contact’s social connections, advocacy ranking and referral ranking.
You’ll exactly know how to deal with them specifically. You’ll get informed of their latest updates in one-click, as you view their social pages. You can also have a customized data for your contacts. You can assign them to sales team members and write internal comments on their profile page. With the social CRM, you can use the latest information to work out what’s best for your e-commerce business so all your sales and marketing efforts have positive results.
Why It’s Important:Running social media campaigns focuses your social media marketing efforts on a particular business goal. Whether it’s to boost brand recognition, cultivate brand loyalty, gain more opportunities for sales conversion such as more website visitors, or make higher conversion rates, social campaigns are very effective in getting your audience attention so that they will perform the action that you want them to take. How is that possible? Through a coordinated social marketing system, you’re going to spread the word about your social campaign theme to a target audience. In exchange for their participation, you’ll be giving away rewards and prizes that meet the criteria which you’ll set prior to starting the campaign.
Social media campaigns can mobilize your online community, especially if there are big rewards or prizes and the process of joining is fun and exciting. High levels of community engagement are achieved during the social campaign activity period. It’s an exciting experience for the fans of most brands because they get to interact with the business itself and other fans. Before a campaign is started, all the tools for tracking and referrals need to be in place. Through social media marketing tools, every social media action, like shares, retweets, likes, and mention of keywords related to your e-commerce brand are all measured. Later on, you can use all these to determine which worked best for your audience and which didn’t. And that’s what you really want to know, so you can use this information for better marketing and sales for your business.
Agora Pulse has ‘light’ Facebook timeline campaign support for brands that are looking to dip their toes in the water. There is no support for Facebook tabs, microsites, or other social networks.
Sprout Social only supports an employee advocacy social campaign through its own platform called Bambu. It doesn’t support running other social media campaigns.
TweetDeck is a Twitter management tool only. It doesn’t support social media campaigns. However, if one of your social campaigns make use of hashtags, you can monitor them using TweetDeck.
Creating effective social campaigns can be a quick and easy task at Sociamonials, especially if you’re new to this. Its platform is designed with so many customizations, automation, integration with third-party service providers, campaign testing for best results, tracking and retargeting. You have everything you need to run great social media campaigns, and manage your data analytics so it all converts to business revenue.
You can customize your campaign design by using a WYSIWYG editor, so it’s more attractive for your audience. There are 16 campaign types that you can choose from to drive engagement to your social followers. With these done-for-you design templates and a number of beautiful background images, you can point-click-and-deploy an agency quality social campaign in minutes. You can also match the design of your email[6] notifications with that of your brand through our WYSIWYG editor. You can do whatever customization you like, as you take control of the whole process. You can create a separate email for each step of submission, such as: Thank you for signing up, internal email notifications, your submission is approved, voting is open/don’t forget to share, etc. These are important elements of user experience, and you need to make sure that it’s fun and memorable for them.
Here’s a quick rundown of other things that you can do when you use Sociamonials for your social campaigns. You can easily implement a tracking and retargeting tag management. AdRoll retargeting campaigns can be setup to encourage your visitors to come back and submit, if they’re unable to complete the form submission process of any campaign. Through Sociamonials’ API[7] integrations, you can opt to use your own email provider and list. Even if you use Sociamonials forms for submissions, it can be set to automatically add data to your email provider or CRM. You can take advantage of Sociamonials’ advanced sweepstakes functionalities. You can choose between a one-time or periodic winner selection period. Your system will always be secured through its fraud prevention design that flags suspicious entries. It’s a great platform to run referral marketing programs, as it tracks all referrals and it can award additional entries for referrals that come from various channels. Use it for your e-commerce business to take your prospects to automated sales funnels, so that they can become your customers and brand advocates in the end.
Each software tool has its own strengths and weaknesses. However, you’re the one who’s in charge of the direction of your e-commerce business, right? Think of what you need to achieve in the next six months or so. Does your current social media management platform support your social media campaign marketing goals? Or do you need to use additional tools so that you can work on your social media and online business together? Remember, there are software tools that can fulfill all your social media and business needs in just one system. It’s all up to you, whether you really want to do your best, save time and focus on growing your e-commerce business. You need to choose the right software tools that can help you make wise business decisions.
If you’re interested in checking out an alternative software tool to what’s popular out there and be blown-away by its simplicity, functionality, completeness as a social media management tool, business growth tracking tool, and all this at an affordable price, sign-up for a free trial today.
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