If you’re struggling to generate and prove Return On Investment (ROI) with your social media campaigns, you’re not alone. Social media marketing is notoriously nebulous and time-consuming to implement.
Social media management software can help. These are tools designed to bring all your accounts under one roof and streamline posting. They also typically provide advanced analytics that help track the success of your campaigns.
In this article, we’ll cover what constitutes a successful social campaign and how a social media management app can help. Then we’ll cover some of the top solutions in this competitive space. Let’s dig in!
Understanding What Makes a Social Media Campaign Successful
The first and most important factor to consider here is that what constitutes success depends on your goals. If you want to increase your conversion or ‘hit’ rate for a product or service, the metrics you’ll want to track are going to look very different than if your goal is to build brand awareness.
Next, consider how social media can help you achieve that goal. For example, if you want more sales of your leading product, a campaign involving influencer and affiliate marketing or directed ads might be beneficial.
Finally, determine the metrics you’ll use to measure success. If you’re leveraging affiliate marketing, a solid measure of your hit rate would be comparing how many users land on your site from affiliate links compared to how many then go on to make purchases.
On the other hand, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might instead track how often posts with a given hashtag are shared. You can also monitor how often your business is mentioned on social networks.
In other words, the key to tracking success is knowing what you need to track. You can only determine that if you have a specific goal laid out from the beginning of your campaign.
How Social Media Management Software Can Boost Your Hit Rate
First thing’s first – if your content isn’t up to snuff, no software is going to make up for that. This means you need quality posts that your audience wants to engage with, along with a solid strategy for your campaigns. Once you’ve got these basics down, you can fully leverage management tools to take your plans to the next level.
Social media management software is useful in several ways:
- The ability to monitor and manage all your social accounts from one place can lead to a huge efficiency boost. You don’t need to hop between different accounts and interfaces.
- Having all your analytics under one roof lets you easily get a bird’s eye view of how your campaign is performing across all channels.
- Many social media management solutions offer deeper, more granular analytics than you’ll find on the individual platforms. This enables you to really drill down and see what’s working and what’s not on each network.
- Scheduling posts enables you to publish content more frequently and at the most optimal times without requiring you to be constantly stuck at your computer.
All this adds up to greatly increased visibility into the performance of your campaigns. You can then use these analytics to inform and update your strategy to maximize hits.
3 of the Best Social Media Management Software
There are a lot of social media management apps on the market, with a wide array of features and price points. These range from simple scheduling tools to powerful and complex (and expensive) enterprise solutions. However, there are a few options that consistently stand out. Let’s take a look at three of them.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite has been around for several years and has consistently been one of the top players in the social media management space.
This solution covers all of the major features you’d expect from a social media management platform – post scheduling, a useful and highly customizable dashboard, and flexible reporting options. You can design your own reports using a module system, or use one of the pre-built Hootsuite templates.
The standout feature of Hootsuite is definitely its integration with other software platforms. The company offers an open source Application Programming Interface (API) and hundreds of apps that let you connect your favorite tools to Hootsuite. Available integrations include Google My Business, Salesforce, and the Adobe suite of creative apps.
Hootsuite offers a limited free tier you can try out. Paid plans start at $29 per month.
2. Sendible
Sendible brings a slightly different take on the usual social media management paradigm. It’s designed specifically with agencies in mind (although it also works well for small and midsize businesses).
Sendible offers an intuitive scheduling function that lets you seamlessly edit content without interrupting your flow, and the dashboard is also focused on publishing. There are plenty of analytics and brand monitoring tools on tap as well.
However, where Sendible really shines is with features to make it easier for agencies to serve their customers. These include team management tools, the ability to require approval on posts before publishing, and other workflow tweaks to make it easier to collaborate and manage multiple clients.
Pricing for Sendible starts at $29 per user per month.
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social brings an excellent mix of analytics and ease-of-use that makes it an ideal social media solution for small businesses. Features include a helpful dashboard wizard that lets you easily tailor its content to your business’s needs, social listening tools to monitor your brand across channels, and an integrated social Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
However, the standout feature of Sprout Social is just how well it nails the basics. The clean design, robust analytics, and thoughtful polish across the entire app make it a stellar tool for businesses of every size.
The biggest drawback is the cost. Sprout Social pricing starts at $99 per user per month.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a seasoned pro in need of better analytics, or you’re new to social marketing and want help getting a handle on things, social media management software can help. These apps provide streamlined account management and powerful analytics, and make increasing engagement easy.
Combine these tools with a clear goal, a solid strategy, and well-defined metrics, and you’ll be well on your way to cranking up your social media hit rate. Best of all, you can save a tremendous amount of time doing it.
Do you have any questions or tips on social media management? Let us know in the comments section below!
The post How Social Media Management Software Can Boost Your ‘Hit’ Rate appeared first on Torque.
