If you manage more than one social media account, you should consider a social media dashboard program to help you keep your accounts under control. Social media marketing can take a lot of work out of your daily routine if you are attempting manage multiple accounts without an app. Here are five of the most popular and highly recommended platforms for your review.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a great platform for managing social media marketing (full disclosure: Jackson Marketing Services is both a customer and a Hootsuite Solution Partner). With Hootsuite you can manage the your accounts on all the major networks:
- Facebook — personal, pages, and groups,
- LinkedIn — individual, company pages, and groups,
- Twitter,
- Google+ — brand pages only,
- Tumblr,
- StumbleUpon,
- YouTube,
- and more.
Hootsuite makes it so easy because you don’t have to log into separate accounts to monitor or send updates. You can even schedule updates for future publication — with an auto-schedule feature available to select the optimum time for posting. Added bonus: you can broadcast updates to multiple accounts at once. You can manage up to five accounts at once using a free account. If you need to manage more accounts, try the free trial of the Hootsuite Pro plan.
You can also monitor conversations using create search streams and monitor all of your social network profiles from one customizable web and mobile dashboard. With HootSuite, you can set up search streams, keyword monitoring, or list monitoring. This will give you access to great content people are already sharing on social media. It also gives you customized reports that let you analyze activity among your followers across all networks.
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a free tool for Twitter only. You can organize your feeds, filter, schedule, and monitor with Tweetdeck. This tool provides an easy way to view all of your Twitter activity at once.
Tweetdeck lets you:
- segment your followers,
- create columns based around certain categories,
- find data on specific users with just a click.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a robust tool with many great features including reporting, monitoring, and scheduling. Like Hootsuite Pro, there is a free 30-day trial so that you can try it before you buy it. Sprout Social works with Foursquare and other geo-local sites.
Sprout Social can also be used for reputation management. You can set alerts for anytime your brand or certain keywords are mentioned.
Postling
Postling is another social media monitoring dashboard app that lets you see all of your social media activity at once. Additionally, you can make one post that goes to all social media sites. Postling can send notifications straight into your inbox. Similar to Sprout Social, Postling has an alerts function that is much faster than Google Alerts. You get almost instant notification when someone mentions your brand. You can take a Postling 30-day trial for $1.
Crowdbooster
If your primary focus is on Facebook and Twitter, you might want to consider Crowdbooster. Crowdbooster’s strength lies in its analytics capabilities. You can access detailed statistics for your Facebook and Twitter accounts with great insights on follower engagement. Crowdbooster tells you how well you are doing, but it also provides recommendations to help you do better. Crowdbooster also makes it easier to find influencers on both social media networks.
Conclusion
Before choosing a program, make a list of the features that are most important to you. Use that as your guide to choosing your app.
Try these steps:
- Review each option listed.
- Decide which features are most important for you.
- Sign up for the free version or trial of the one that sounds best.
- Try it out for the next week and see if it’s a good fit for you.
