4 social media tools that make life easier

Social media is important for connecting and engaging with prospects and clients, but undoubtedly, it’s a lot of work.  Social media “work” can easily eat up your entire day. The four tools below will help you become more efficient and productive and maximize the value you’ll get out of social media.

1. HootSuite

Hootsuite is a social media dashboard that will help you to effectively manage your social media networks. You’ll be able to view multiple social network feeds and pages right from Hootsuite and post status updates to a number of them at once. This eliminates the time you would have to take to log into one social media site after another.

Hootsuite is also a very reliable tool for scheduling posts. If you want to ensure that you’re posting consistently to say, Facebook and Twitter, you can write and schedule your posts for the day, week, or even month. This saves you the time (and often hassle) of having to log into Twitter, for instance, multiple times a day to send out individual tweets.

Another great feature Hootsuite offers is the ability to run reports to see how many people clicked on the links you distributed via social media. You can see which posts or status updates resonate more with your followers so you have an idea of what to publish more and less of.

I also like that Hootsuite lets you view the Klout score and follower count of those you follow on Twitter. This will help you determine the most influential people in your “Twitter circle.” With this information, you can keep a special eye on these people, develop relationships with them, and engage with them more often.

2 Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster is a social media tool that will actually provide you with suggestions on when to post Facebook status updates and when to send out Tweets based on when you’ve received the most engagement in the past.

Using Crowdbooster, you can easily see a graph of all your tweets and/ or Facebook status updates over a specified time and which ones received the most impressions and likes or re-tweets. This information is useful because you can quickly see your best performing posts at a glance and get an idea of what to post more and less of.

Crowdbooster will also tell you your top Facebook fans over the course of a given time period based on comments, mentions, and likes. This is great if you’d like to reward or thank your fans or have a “fan of the week” status update or contest (which I highly recommend). Encouraging and appreciating fans who engage with you helps spur greater participation which will in turn increase your Facebook EdgeRank.

3. Twilert

Twilert is one of my favourite Twitter monitoring tools because you can very easily get a pulse for what people are talking about in the “twitterverse.” Twilert will send you email alerts of tweets based on key words or phrases you specify. These key words can be your name, the name of your company, or your SEO keywords. If you’re a real estate agent in Los Angeles, you may want to set up an email alert for the phrase “Huntington Beach properties,” for example.

4. Hyper Alerts

We all know that social media is a full-time job. But as a small business, you may not have the manpower to check social media sites constantly and respond to questions and comments. This is where Hyper Alerts comes in. Hyper Alerts will send you an email when your followers post something to your Facebook wall or respond to one of your posts. You can get alerts right away or get the system to send you one alert per day at a specified time.

A good idea is to reserve a certain amount of time per day to respond to Facebook comments, say 4pm, and Hyper Alerts will email you a report at this time with all of your Facebook comments. Although Hyper Alerts is limited to Facebook at this point (which is disappointing), the tool is very useful!

Which social media tools do you use?