Tag Archives: viralheat

10 Great Community Manager Tools Worth Checking Out

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Social Media simple and easy? Community Managers realize that is not the case. Social media takes a great time commitment and effort in order to manage efficiently and productively to assist a brand and accomplish marketing and business goals. So wouldn’t some cool tools be helpful in order to help a community manager manage his or her time better? I think so! Check out the tools I recommend for community managers and others implementing social media for their brands…

1) UberVu: known as the “social media platform that helps your team collaborate on listening, reporting and engaging in social media.” The team has been working hard on the upcoming release, which has two major goals: (1) making it easier for customers to get results from a few key use cases, like finding the right key people to engage with in social media and to do social media marketing; (2) make the service more small business friendly by making it both easier to use and focusing on solving some key problems that small businesses  are trying to address. As Dragos fromUberVu informed me, community managers will definitely want this because UberVuhas “simplified the service to an extent that most people can understand and get value from in minutes.” Aka – keep it simple stupid. Great motto, great product for community managers.

 

2) PostPost: For the upcoming release, there will be “faster results, more engaging results, faster new user onboarding, and reliable scaling.” Current users, which include Twitter users who value the people they follow and what they share, already love the tool and rave about it. Why should a community manager give it a shot?  In the words of Brad from PostPost, “We make engaging information more discoverable in the noisiest age of all-time.” Cutting through the clutter is huge, and a tool that can help is indispensable. In addition, as more and more information is shared on Twitter, Twitter becomes more valuable, but also more noisy. Which is to say that the value that’s there is harder to find. PostPost is uniquely designed to solve that problem. The search engine brings back Tweets, links and photos from the people you follow—the relevant content totally missing from real-time search.

3) Trunk.ly: Another cool service which has upgraded its already awesome offerings. In short, Trunk.ly is useful because it “automagically” collects the links you share online and then makes them searchable so you can find and retrieve them for later viewing or sharing. Tweet many links? Wish you had a easy way to “bookmark” them, save them, reference and utilize them later, but can’t find them anymore? Trunk.ly is perfect for just that. Simple, easy, and organized.

4) Viralheat: This nifty service “heats” up the social media monitoring and analysis process by doing half the work for you. It tracks mentions on the social platforms you use as well as mentions across the web including blog posts and articles. For example, if you’re working on a campaign, Viralheat will track when the campaign is being mentioned anywhere and everywhere, whether you’re at your computer or not. The tool that does the detailed analysis and lets you breathe a little easier.

5) Instagram: This tool may not organize your social media madness, but it is a creative way to utilize pictures in your campaigns as well as just helping with creating brand awareness and engagement with your target market. People don’t want to just see Tweets, posts, etc. They want to see fun visuals and things that allow them to see further into your brand — like the “human” side. So use instagram, snap a picture, make it cheesy and fun, and share on Twitter and/or Facebook for your brand lovers to see and comment on.

 

6) Twentyfeet: A tool that aggregates your stats in one place, which again decreases the time you spend on worrying about your social media – especially when it’s the weekend. Twentyfeet will let you know when there’s a stat you need to handle and manage right away. For example, it will give you an overview of your social platforms and let you know how your “key performance indicators develop over time,” and then “nudge you” when your metrics shift in a significant manner.

 

7) Formulists: Can’t remember who’s in what list on Twitter, who’s new, who’s removed? This nifty tool will help you to keep up with your newest followers, most recent tweeps you’ve chatted with, and more (which you can all adjust). Thus, you can worry less on keeping track of your tweeps and focus on keeping up with conversations that matter.

 8) Posterous: Tired of posting to each individual platform? Wish you could do it simply and efficiently all from one place with less worry and stress?Posterous allows you to post to multiple social media platforms via one simple medium. What? Your email! Photos, video, blog posts, even podcasts can all be distributed throughout your network just by sending an email. Convenience – yes, please!

9) Storify: No time to create content today? Curation is helpful in those instances. Storify helps community managers aggregate and curate content from around the social sphere and web. This tool is specifically helpful for when you are doing a specific campaign or event, in order to aggregate all the info simply and easily and then utilize for your marketing purposes.

 

 

10) Seesmic: Aside from the lovable mascot, Seesmic is an exceptional tool for being efficient and on top of all your social networks in one place, and at one time. Another great thing about Seesmic is that you can keep track of mentions, direct messages, and all your searches and more via one tool for your many platforms. It can also be used in any browser and on any smart phone. The “on the go” usage is key especially for real-time efficiency  – all great community managers know this. Don’t believe me? Check out their testimonials!

 

Next step? Check out the tools for yourself, tinker around, and comment below on what you think.

Note: this post was originally written for oneforty, which was acquired by Hubspot. 


7 Ways to Monitor Social Media for Less

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This is an excerpt from my post for oneforty…

Although social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are free in order to engage with your target audience — the tools to monitor are not always so “free.” We’ve written before about the things you need to keep in mind before choosing the right tool. There are many things these tools can track, and it’s best to narrow down what your specific needs are and then find the best tool for you and at the price you can afford. Here are a few tools that could be useful for your “specific” or “many” needs:

PostRank: A great inexpensive tool for analytics, which can also be linked to Google Analytics for an even more detailed look into your metrics. You can use it to discover your influencers, measure your performance, track online content, benchmark competition, and have a better eye on the social web. This is especially a great tool for bloggers and community managers in a company to monitor social engagement. Keep in mind that social engagement can include anything related to (for example) your blog post, such as a comment,  tweet, or trackback and any of these would be tracked by PostRank. Why not try the free trial and see the potential for yourself? PostRank comes with a free trial and has 3 pricing plans: Free for Influencer; $15/month personal; and $500/month agency.

 Beevolve: A social media monitoring tool allows all types of companies and agencies to track social engagement in order to get a handle on what consumers are saying, thinking and feeling. According to Beevolve, the types of companies who will find this the most useful include: startups, PR agencies, corporate, social media agencies, digital marketing and search engine marketing agencies. Beevolve makes it easier for your company or agency to  better isolate trends and use these results to figure out whether your product, service and/or marketing  may need certain improvements. Highlighted tools include: real-time monitoring, sentiment analysis, demographics & geography, competitive analysis, influencer identification, and engagement workflow among other things. Thus, this is a crafty tool to help “mine” through review sites, Twitter, and other sites on the web to get a better insight into the products, brands, and trends that consumers have sentiment towards.  Beevolve includes a 14 day free trial and has numerous pricing plans starting from $29.95/month to custom made plans. 

 Viralheat: As many of the others, Viralheat has benefits including extensive social platform and web coverage, influencer analytics, finding consumer sentiment, analytics to determine the best ROI for your campaigns, and more. Viralheat also has some sweet clients (aka they’re on “fire”) using their tools including HP, Coca Cola,MTV, Disney, and  NHL among others. So, Viralheat must be doing something pretty impressive. And as of this past year, Viralheat integrated with Facebook, Twitalyzer, and Klout. And another great thing? The pricing isnt bad either. Viralheat offers a 7 day free trial and 3 pricing plans including Basic: $9.99/month, Professional: $29.99/month and Business: $89.99/month.

 eCairn: A tool to help marketers monitor not just the real-time web but find influencers and leverage communities they want to target and focus on.  Thus making it easier to listen and engage efficiently with those that you care to engage with. For example, eCairn assists marketers to identify influencers for blogger outreach, monitor brands, get to the specifics of what’s being said, in order to revise strategy and report back to upper-level management on how marketing is going, and what can be improved. To learn more about what eCairn can do for your company, you can also watch live demos and webinars, which are featured on their blog. It’s key when a social media based company is using social media tools, don’t you think? eCairn hastwo pricing models: Basic: $99/user/month or Pro: $199/user/month.

BrandsEye: The tool to help you protect your online brand reputation. Their monitoring can help single bloggers, small businesses as well as large enterprises. Considering brand reputation can be attacked at any moment and multiple times online, it is up to the brand to keep an eye on what is being said, why it’s being said, and what they can do to rectify such situations. A prominent example is Domino’s Pizza and their YouTube debacle and United Airlines and their issue with “mishandling a guitar” — whatever the issue may be — people talk! So your brand most likely needs a helpful monitoring tool to keep track of what’s being said, as soon as it’s said, in order for your brand to respond promptly. BrandsEye promises to be the tool to do just that. And if you run into a crisis, they also offer assistance in fixing situations too. BrandsEye is $1/month for bloggers, $95/month for small businesses and $350 for enterprise.

 Trackur: As the name suggests, Trackur “tracks” down any and all mentions of specific keywords your company would like to keep “track” of. In addition, like other social monitoring tools Trackur assists with finding the influencers, what’s being said about your brand, sentiment tag (who’s saying positive and/or negative things), have alerts kept in your dashboard or emailed directly for ease of use, among other perks. The tool offers a quick and easy service that allows you to “get running” within minutes rather than waiting for setup and demos, etc. And for those of us trying to keep up with “real-time” that could be pretty handy! Trackur offers 4 pricing plansstarting at $18/month up to $377/month depending upon the extensive use and needs you may have.

 Ubervu: The second I went on to their website I saw a livechat option, which is very helpful nowadays when one wants “real-time” assistance to go along with an applicatoin/tool/service to help with keeping up with “real-time” social media interaction. Ubervu is modeled for either businesses or PR agencies to use. Businesses can “understand customers, be on top of the competition, and get leads from social media” and PR agencies can have “all the social media in one place, white label solution for consumers, and automated sentiment analysis.” According toTechCrunch, Ubervu helps to “organize the mess.” Who needs an assistant, when you have Ubervu “assisting” your social media organizational and monitoring needs?Ubervu has 4 pricing options beginning from $49.99/month for a solo user up to Enterprise pricing options which Ubervu will need to be contacted for.

Remember: it’s strategy first, tools second. There are so many tools and so many options to decide from. Take the time to research what your company, agency, organization needs are. Do you need assistance finding influencers, monitoring what’s being said about your brand or keeping an eye on your competition? Whatever your need may be, there is a tool for it. The key is deciding what’s most important for your company/brand to invest in.