Social Media Marketing Tools

Whether you want to include social media marketing in yourdiet or not, it is here to stay. Avoiding this essential nutrient in your “Mediterranean Marketing Diet” canbe very harmful to your marketing health. Billions flock to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest,Flickr, YouTube, Google+ and many other social media networks to connect,engage, share, promote and complain.  

Unfortunately a recent study showed that an astonishing 70%of companies are not responding to the consumers who are complaining abouttheir brand via their social media accounts. 

Aside from maintaining your online reputation and keepingyour consumers happy, social media is a free and relatively easy way tomarketing your brand and reach audiences faster and more frequently.

The following are tools which make social media marketingsimple and easy to use.  Either integratethese tools into your social media campaign yourself or recommend them to your company’ssocial media manager. 

Hootsuite

Imagine spending only an hour every week on Social Media.  Schedule your posts for an entire week in onehour and then walk away.  That’s thebeauty that Hootsuite delivers to your social media marketing.  Spend as much or as little time as you wishin scheduling to yours and your company’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and othersocial media profiles.   Hootsuite alsoallows you to check and respond to the @ mentions and direct messages you receiveon the Twitter accounts that you manage. Lastly, track which posts receive the most clicks with their analyticstool.  You can even create, download andschedule reports to be sent to you weekly.

http://www.hootsuite.com 

Event Brite

Planning, inviting, marketing and hosting events have neverbeen easier.  Eventbrite is easy to useand caters to free events or events which require guests to purchase tickets.  There is no installation or monthly user feesand you can event link your PayPal or credit cards to receive payments.   Eventbrite also synchs to your social mediapages to help you share your event with friends.  Customized event pages, email marketing,custom URL’s and even QR codes are just some of the fabulous features thatEventbrite offers.

http://www.eventbrite.com

Google Alerts

If you have ever Google’d your name or your company name,this is the tool for you!  Google Alertsis one of the best and easiest ways monitor yours and your brand’s onlinereputation.  Google will email youwhenever it finds anything regarding you or your business.  You decide what you want Google to find (ie.Company name, your name…) and how often you wish to receive emails.  Set up the notifications and frequency andvoila! You’ve just hired a PR crisis monitor for FREE.  Now you just have to read the emails.

http://www.google.com/alerts

Mr. Unfollowr

Does it seem like you’re losing a bit too many followers on Twitter? Perhaps you should re-think what you areposting before you click the “Tweet” button.   But, you should also check out Mr. Unfollowr.  This tool shows you who has unfollowedyou.  Use it to make sure your real-lifenetworks or friends are still hanging onto your every tweet, but to also makesure that new followers you’ve interacted with you are still on your list.  If you’ve found you lost a follower and wantto regain them on your follower’s list, try to subtly tweet and engage them again.

http://unfollower.name/